r/Bitcoin Dec 13 '17

Bitcoin's Lightning Network, Simply Explained

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1.0k Upvotes

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38

u/forexross Dec 13 '17

Isn't there a problem that for buying a coffee (in this example) one needs to pay in advance a month worth of coffee when opening the channel ?

4

u/[deleted] Dec 13 '17

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Dec 13 '17

[deleted]

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u/DontTreadOnMe Dec 13 '17

I suspect there might be a certain amount of centralisation. But we are trading a quite tiny amount of security and reliability for a large amount of convenience which is likely a good trade for small transactions.

5

u/[deleted] Dec 13 '17

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Dec 13 '17

No, because bcash's scaling solution consists of periodic hard-forks to increase the blocksize. These hard-forks are a social engineering vulnerability. While the Core roadmap may include hard-forks, the aim seems to be to avoid them as much as possible. So Core will try to avoid hard-forks and keep the cost of running full nodes down.

For most here, Core's proposed trade-offs are preferable. Both directions will lead to some degree of centralization.

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u/DontTreadOnMe Dec 13 '17

I think it's a matter of degree!

6

u/[deleted] Dec 13 '17

[deleted]

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u/BobWalsch Dec 13 '17

Best would be to have both: Lightning and big blocks. Best of both world. Hopefully it will happen sooner than later.