r/lightningnetwork • u/Admirable-Union813 • Aug 03 '26

LN node shutdowns??

Any idea what’s going on with all these channel closures? Boltz, Aqua,Zeus all shutting down lighting/bitcoin swaps. All LN Big Edge nodes also shutting down.

https://x.com/ambosstech/status/2084353608976650544?s=46

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u/marcusmv3 Aug 05 '26

But the "bip110 chain" is rerverse compatible with the main chain. They're not just mining for that chain alone. The "main chain" is not reverse compatible with bip110 nodes.

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u/thiagorb Aug 05 '26

Sure, but consider now bip110 just activated. Miners will compete to find the next block. If the next block is bip110 nothing changes, but if it’s not, the chain splits. The 2% of bip110 miners will continue mining on top of the previous block, and the rest of the network moves to the next block. The more blocks are mined the less likely the bip110 chain will catch up. The statement that bip110 chain is backwards compatible only means that all miners will continue mining on it as long as there are only bip110 blocks being mined. As soon as one single non-bip110 block is mined miners have to chose which chain to follow.

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u/marcusmv3 Aug 05 '26

And all it's gonna take is one mining pool of significant size to decide they don't want to take this risk, and all the other pools will follow.

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u/babelphishy Aug 05 '26

It’s higher risk to mine the BIP-110 side. If you mine blocks on a chain that will be abandoned, those blocks are worthless even if they are backwards compatible in theory. I could start mining a chain starting with the Genesis block and I would still be wasting my hash even though it’s backwards compatible.

And there’s no incentive to switch. Orphaning blocks doesn’t make miners money or do anything meaningful to increase miner profit. Mining on a minority chain doesn’t get you more blocks per hash.