[...]

Node discovery can occur along the edges by pre-selecting and offering

partial routes to well-known nodes. Click to expand...

One of my most fascinating early conversations with the original Lightning Network paper author, Joseph Poon , had us speculating on what the Lightning Network will look like once it’s up and running. Your phone would initially connect to the Lightning Network by establishing channels with five random nodes, we posited. From there, you could make payments for some variable but small fee to anyone else on the network. Click to expand...

Will this actually happen? I have no idea! Click to expand...

Presume Alice wishes to send 0.001 BTC to Dave. She locates a route

through Bob and Carol. The transfer path would be Alice to Bob to Carol

to Dave. Click to expand...

Oh, let's see how routing is solved in the Lightning whitepaper, they spentin a 60 page paper on that problem:Oh. How decentralized.But wait, Rusty Russell knows how to solve it:(from https://blockstream.com/2015/09/01/lightning-network.html Oh, yeah that looks like a good plan. Five random nodes with five random amounts in the channels. Problem solved.Thanks, Rusty! It looks like nobody has a fucking idea who works on Lightning.And because it's so beautiful, from the whitepaper again:Presume I want Pi to be exactly 3. I locate proof for that and therefore: Pi=3!God damnit. I'm absolutely no expert in networks or routing or whatever but how can anybody think that this bullshit is anything but a sham?- There is no definition for a lightning network- There is no formal proof, that the proposed channels are always in a defined state (I guess it's easy to prove, but that's the duty of the lightning proponents..)And finally: All "solutions" I've seen rely on at least some trust in the end. I don't get where the proposed real world advantage over cascaded micropayment channels (that exist) is?I have the suspicion, that there actually is no solution to that trust problem. And that every "improvement" they come up with just makes it more complicated and relocates the need for trust to some other entity, but keeps the needed "amount of trust" the same. No idea, whether it's possible to formally prove that, but the empirical evidence until now supports that idea.The more I read, it looks like Lightning is a case of massive over engineering. I don't have a problem with fine tuning, a car today does a lot of control work, that the first cars didn't do and the manufacturers improve their control software to get 0.01 % more efficiency. That's fine. But it's not fine to not build the first car, just because it's possible to build a better car in a few decades.1. On chain transactions must be affordable by normal users, for normal transactions. That is the working system, that needs the least amount of trust in third parties.2. Micropayments (I talk about amounts smaller than e.g. five dollars) should be done offchain. I'm very excited for possibilities to anonymously support bloggers, pay for newspaper articles or something like netflix with Bitcoin micropayments etc. without having to register and give away credit card information.But that can be done with existing micropayment channels in a way that's pretty close to what LN allows (allegedly). Without messing up Bitcoin.[/quote][/quote]