[Lightning-dev] General question on routing difficulties

[Benjamin Mord]

Ivan,

That is mostly false, but with bits of truth sprinkled in. Contact me at
ben at mord.io for further discussion so we tread lightly on the lists' email
inboxes. But briefly: scale-capable routing protocols are possible as
demonstrated by IP and thus by the internet itself. As for centralizing
flow through small number of liquidity providers, yes that does seem
economically probable, at least unless / until off-chain channel
rebalancing mechanism (like the recently proposed "revive" protocol) come
about. Bitcoin script is not currently revive-capable but Ethereum is, so
either Bitcoin revive could be enabled via two-way pegged sidechain
protocol with Ethereum, or even better, by a purpose-built (yet still not
Turing-complete) extension to Bitcoin script itself in the future. In
either case the lightning network seems a key first step, and even were
off-chain payment rebalancing not possible for some odd reason, the
lightning network seems extremely valuable and scaleable - regardless
because the centralization you speak is not one that affects safety of the
money supply itself, and these centralized hubs would be more dispensable /
swappable versus the mining centralization risk that people more often talk
about in Bitcoin. Lightning network centralization, even if it persisted
somehow despite revive and future concepts, would not be an existential
risk. As for transaction fees, the idea is only channel setup / tear down
are required greatly reducing fees. Yes if txin fees were millions of
dollars then people could not practically penalize fraud, but that is
unlikely. Even if txin fees made fraud claims marginally unprofitable (yet
practical) that would still be ok - the judicial systems of most countries
prove that people go beyond self-interest when sufficiently ticked, a fact
of human psychology which in turn creates the incentives that support
honest business. (Also please be aware I'm not a lightning code
contributor, so that team might also be doing more to address already than
I thought to mention above.)

I'll post more about this on http://ben.mord.io

Thanks,
Ben


On Thu, Nov 16, 2017 at 9:26 AM, Ivan Raszl <iraszl at gmail.com> wrote:

> I came across a thread discussing lightning network on reddit. A comment
> was stating there is an unresolvable issue with the concept of lightning
> network, related to routing. Quoting the comment:
>
> "The problem is, actually scaling and preventing decentralization requires
> far more than a nice UX that lets you shoot tx from alpha-tester-A to
> alpha-tester-B, and Lightning currently utterly fails at both of them. It
> can't scale to 100,000 users due to routing difficulties; nor does it has
> any plan of bootstrapping to "everyone using it" without the hubs
> hypercentralizing to a few "liquidity providers" (read:banks); nor does it
> have any plans to have actual security on a congested blockchain with high
> fees. As a scaling solution, Lightning is a lot worse than the blockchain
> itself right now."
>
> Can somebody comment on this? Thanks!
>
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>
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