News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Lightning Network Flaws by skybrian on Friday October 01, 2021 @07:45PM (#28724659)
This is an impressively long list of articles about problems with Bitcoin’s Lightning Network. It’s not my area of expertise so I thought I’d see what people have to say about it.
Re:Lightning Network Flaws by 3np on Saturday October 02, 2021 @03:08AM (#28726634)
The list is a mixed bag of past CVEs; discussions on challenges or concerns (some absolutely valid) with architecture, routing, emergent centralization and privacy; FUD social media/blogspam; past and current (but solvable) UX issues; reddit/twitter rants; etc. Many of the links are nothing-burgers but there are a few exceptions.

Specifically wrt to privacy, there are pitfalls and subtleties in using Lightning Network privately but it is doable. I think this article does a good job summarizing the current state [0].

IMO LN is secure enough to sleep well at night with open channels but you definitely want uptime monitoring and at least one watchtower hosted on separate infrastructure from the LN node, or great trust in whatever custodial wallet provider you may be using to not doxx you if you do and that's a concern. (Seriously though, any cryptocurrency going through any form of custodianship with any form of company/business will eventually have to be KYC’d and accounted for to authorities, if currently existing and planned regulations take effect. Self-custody and, for L2 like LN, self-hosting, takes some self-education but is the only way to get the true benefits of cryptocurrencies)

[0]: https://abytesjourney.com/lightning-privacy/

Re:Lightning Network Flaws by __Admin__ on Saturday October 02, 2021 @12:34AM (#28725985)
LN is a "soltion" Blockstream (tm) created to solve a problem Blockstream created.

"Solution" because it does not actaully allow fast and cheap "cash-like" transactions as Bitcoin was originally designed to do (and still can easily scale to Visa-like levels).

From day one Satoshi had built Bitcoin to scale to to Visa levels of transactions by simply incrementaly increasing the block size over time. Blockstream hijacked the Bitcoin Core GitHub repo and soon after disabled several core features and have since refused to increase the block size while pushing their products (Liquid and LN) as "solutions" to this problem they created.

Re:Lightning Network Flaws by Vecr on Saturday October 02, 2021 @11:32PM (#28734333)
No, Blockstream's thing was Liquid, an actual product that was supposed to make them money. Lightning can't really make them any money (they would get caught in a race to the bottom), unless they want to do consulting. Consulting probably would not give them much or any control.