Re:The cryptocurrency sell-off has exposed those swimming naked
by gitfan86 on Friday May 20, 2022 @09:41AM
(#31447234)
It is almost like 99.999% of the crypto people don't have computer engineering or computer science degrees or have never built a production system that requires concurrency and fault tolerance over a persistence layer.
A system that validates new entries into a database can either be "very cheap and very fast" or "very fault tolerant and very decentralized". The speed of light in networking and the speed of modern CPUs make this unavoidable.
Even worse, if you saw my transaction, then sent me 1BTC worth of goods, then your node becomes offline and I forcefully close the channel with the original balance, I still have my 1BTC and there is no proof anywhere except your node that the transaction ever happened. So no security, unless both nodes are online.
Finally, unless you open direct channels with everyone you want to transact with, you will rely on a 3rd party node that does have such a channel. In practice, this likely means you will use one of a few major nodes that you trust to stay online and not refuse transactions, so the payments are in effect highly centralized.