Author: Eric Lombrozo 2015-06-29 01:13:29
Published on: 2015-06-29T01:13:29+00:00
The Lightning network is a contract negotiation scheme that rewards cooperation and incurs a bigger cost to the uncooperative party than cooperation. This fixes the prisoner's dilemma in blockchains, thereby becoming a dispute resolution mechanism and a way to anchor stuff. Eric Lombrozo believes that any use case covered by the current method of "flood the entire network and confirm on blockchain" can be covered by a method of "participate in a contract which guarantees me payment on the blockchain if anyone is uncooperative but which rarely requires touching the blockchain". The Lightning Network paper proposes a source routed network with fees charged on channels, making DoS just a way to pay people a multiple of bandwidth cost. Trustlessness is what matters, and decentralization is just a synonym for trustlessness when talking about the blockchain and mining. Lightning does need a decentralized and secure Bitcoin network for anchor and reclaim transactions, so take it easy with the mega-blocks in the meantime. Lightning + a decentralized and secure Bitcoin scales further and is more trustless than Bitcoin forced into centralization via premature mega-blocks. A shorter, more conservative block-size increase to give a few years room is enough for now. We'll be in a better position to know what the right next step is after lightning is running.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T01:22:14.481082+00:00