On Sun, Jun 28, 2015 at 7:29 PM, Gavin Andresen <gavinandre...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Sun, Jun 28, 2015 at 1:12 PM, Mark Friedenbach <m...@friedenbach.org> > wrote: >> >> But ultimately, lightning usefully solves a problem where participants >> have semi-long lived payment endpoints. > > > Very few of my own personal Bitcoin transactions fit that use-case. > > In fact, very few of my own personal dollar transactions fit that use-case > (I suppose if I was addicted to Starbucks I'd have one of their payment > cards that I topped up every once in a while, which would map nicely onto a > payment channel). I suppose I could setup a payment channel with the grocery > store I shop at once a week, but that would be inconvenient (I'd have to > pre-fund it) and bad for my privacy.
Unlike other payment channels designs, the lightning payment channel network allows you to pay to people that you haven't sent a pre-fund to. There's must be a path in the network from you to the payee. That's simpler with only a few hubs although too few hubs is bad for privacy. > I can see how payment channels would work between big financial institutions > as a settlement layer, but isn't that exactly the centralization concern > that is making a lot of people worried about increasing the max block size? Worried about financial institutions using Bitcoin? No. Who said that? > And if there are only a dozen or two popular hubs, that's much worse > centralization-wise compared to a few thousand fully-validating Bitcoin > nodes. Remember the hubs cannot steal any coins. > Don't get me wrong, I think the Lightning Network is a fantastic idea and a > great experiment and will likely be used for all sorts of great payment > innovations (micropayments for bandwidth maybe, or maybe paying workers by > the hour instead of at the end of the month). But I don't think it is a > scaling solution for the types of payments the Bitcoin network is handling > today. I don't see how people could pay coffees with bitcoin in the long term otherwise. Bitcoin IOUs from a third party (or federation) maybe, but not with real p2p btc. _______________________________________________ bitcoin-dev mailing list bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
