I voted for this with all available firepower at my disposal.

Wow, just WOW! 

Soon bitconicore will launch the Lightning Network.

It is a legacy concept drawn from the fiat world where not all monetary properties originate in the same monetary tier due to some deficiencies in the indigenous monetary token that render it less than perfect.

That will be a very significant milestone because it will finally demonstrate that instant transactions (for example) and erasability of history are in fact a priority and have been all along.

Only, Lightning is not a property of the bitcoin blockchain.

It does not enhance (in terms of monetary properties), nor scale, the bitcoin blockchain. Furthermore, its arrival puts into stark contrast the monetary properties of a natively scaleable, natively fungible, publicly transparent blockchain vs a paralysed one that is none of those things and requires a proprietary, corporately owned and run external infrastructure that trades trusted-party promissory notes in place of bearer tokens.

That is the real "wow'. Not the number of masternodes.

(P.S. Just like Bitconi, Gold was too slow to confirm also. So it had a 'lightning network' of its own created known as an 'ETF' where people could just trade promissory notes instead of actual gold bars. The 'bearer token' stayed in the vaults except there was simply less and less of it around and more and more of the paper. At least the paper was fast ).

It depends if you are trying to define a new cash medium or simply support an old one and make it faster.

Payment channels do not redefine bitcoin and that fact is going to stick with it far more malignantly than Dash's instamine did with its fortunes.

There's no monetary medium you can't scale with payment channels and therein lies the problem - it's no better than an exchange in that respect.

It most certainly can.

Thats why, throughout history, all economies have made a distinction between a "bearer token" and a "promissory note" for such.

It's also why bitcoin was invented.

...except they are not exchanging bitcoin.

They are exchanging promissory notes for bitcoin on a platform that has nothing to do with the bitcoin blockchain except that it occasionally attempts to reconcile its position with the asset that backs it.

Monetarily, it's no different from a gold ETF that can get levered up to kingdom come if the powers that happen to be running it see fit to do so.

As I already said - thats what makes the difference between a "bearer token" and a "promissory note".

10,000 year old society already knows all about the Lightning Network. Has already seen it and has already traded it.

Imagine you're a programmer on an accounting system - like Sage or Dynamics or something like that.

You agonise for years over the perfect security systems, audit trails, corporate transparency and compliance support logic.

Then the end user just bins today's datafile and restores yesterday's blowing all your beautiful logic to smithereens in a an otherwise obvious action that simply did not belong to the domain of said 'security logic'.

The ability to do that or not do it is the difference between a bearer token and promissory note for such.

Any honest apologist for bitcoin would admit what the real priority is here - which is leave the protocol untouched, and not to improve its monetary properties natively.

I think they probably can. It's just that we've been convinced they can't by people like Adam Back who have a kind of religious belief that bitcoin was a "one-off event'.

I think you'd find that if technologists really wanted to create a unified, scaleable, instant monetary medium based around a single blockchain then they probably could if they weren't all ego maniacs that thought they were saving the world from financial oblivion rather than just solving another day to day technical problem.

The difference between holding something in your hand and holding a promissory note that says you have it "in your hand" is something that the general public understands very well and if that is the basis for bitcoin's so called "scaleability" then it will only open up markets for electronic assets for which it isn't. Thats all I'm saying.

Is it Adam Back's fault that Bitcoin can't currently scale in a decentralized manner, to, say, a 300tx/sec level at 100mb blocks - or even 1/10th that? No. These are technical issues. It's not a matter of "convincing" and "religious beliefs".


Why is it then that every altcoin is waiting for bitcoin to solve the scaling issue? If technologists had a solution, where is it? Shouldn't it be available right now in some altcoin? Shouldn't the "market gap" allow altcoins to close in by innovating? Why aren't they?


Remember that bitcoin is all about virtual assets so at every moment you never have anything in your hand. It's all in the "cloud" of the blockchain. Even the notion of the "wallet" is just for familiarity purposes. There is no "my wallet". But even for those who believe there is a wallet, and are engaged in a payment channel to aggregate small payments with greater efficiency, they can close that channel and get the money to their wallet. It's that simple.

We don't have to deal with issues like these because we currently don't have thousands of tx per block to deal with. Otherwise we would probably need payment channels as well. Actually it might also be useful for mixing purposes to offload the bloat of a multi-party, multi-round mixing, into a payment channel, eliminating on chain mixing bloat.

in QT wallet,
press Receive - Request Payment - (shows u address and QR code) done