Quote from: BitCryptex on July 14, 2018, 03:56:44 PM

Quote from: Anon136 on July 14, 2018, 02:02:03 PM

Last night I found a service that sold me a little VPS for 2 dollars a month and accepted lightning so I bought it. Not sure what I'm going to do with it yet but maybe try to set up a web page for accepting lightning tips.

Could you post what the name of that service is? Two dollars is not really much so I don't expect that VPS to be powerful, of course.

What about updating the first post of this thread with some useful links? For example, stores which accept Lightning Network payments, a list of LN wallets, (Discussion) Is Lightning Network centralized?, Lightning Network Explorer.

Sure. Here ya go https://www.lavavps.lt/en-anonymous-bitcoin-vps/.

Quote from: infofront on July 15, 2018, 03:06:51 AM

If someone like a banking cartel manages to control 50+% of the LN transactions, it will be difficult to replace. The replacement node(s) may be required to maintain millions of BTC in payment channels to maintain similar liquidity, which would not be easily replaceable.

As I understand it, the lightning network isn't supposed to be for large transactions. It might more severely disrupt some marginal transactions that are above the normal denominations of every day users but below what people tend to consider worth doing on chain. And sure if a huge node like that suddenly went offline it would create disruption and force people to open new channels which would bloat the mempool and temporarily increase on chain fees. The point is that the network would heal almost organically and rather more quickly than many would surmise, I suspect. Even that worst case scinario of one entity routing everything suddenly pulls out, would just heal naturally in time. And destroying your privileged position as largest node on the network just to cause temporary disruption that would heal probably pretty quickly? As an attack vector, it seems like a stretch.

Quote from: infofront on July 15, 2018, 03:06:51 AM

Assuming governments regulate BTC and LN, as they regulate everything, they may require people to use "authorized" LN nodes, to censor nation states, drug traffickers, etc. That depends on how anonymous LN proves to be.

I don't think this is right. A user would only have to find one payment channel that would be willing to route his payment. So if the big centralized node was refusing to route certain payments this would create a market for routing the payments that he was unwilling to route. Smaller parallel payment channels would emerge to serve this market. Even if it wasn't very anonymous, they would stay nimble and mobile and in safe jurisdictions. I'm sure the state could succeed in increasing the fees some what for routing payments like this but probably not to oppressive levels. Where there is a shekel there is a way, as we see with drug prohibition.

Quote from: European Central Bank on July 15, 2018, 11:24:07 PM

more about the one dominant guy on the network

https://twitter.com/ziggamon/status/1018627137320968192

according to that he wants to turn his channel into a honeypot and screw users by trapping them in it with high fees. all character building stuff i guess.

Good good! Bring on that stress testing.