Franky1, I'm asking you this time honestly, aren't you tired of attacking LN?
Why do you even bother, it's a done thing, nobody is giving crap about what some users which are obviously a minority say, especially when their arguments are that cheap transactions are bad, so what are you doing and why?
LN is here to stay and it will die only with Bitcoin, a thing I'm pretty sure you don't want to happen, so why? Seriously, why?


Phil is a miner, and although he is overreacting sometimes his math and reasoning are spot on most of the time.
You can't have security without a mining reward, and you can't have that reward without fees, in a decentralized network it's the users who pay, if you don't find a way to make them pay voluntarily it will suffer the same fate as an NGO that runs out of funds.

I assume you remember our discussions you can't say BTC will become centralized because we need to spend 200$ on some SSD while at the same time thinking gear running on 8GW will do so out of goodwill.
LN and the main chain need equilibrium, and ....money!

The Lightning Network is growing rapidly because it makes Bitcoin more useful for everyday payments. Businesses and people are using it to send and receive small payments quickly and cheaply.
Why this grow happened -
- Business adoption
- People using it for their needs
- Also bitcoin provide financially some freedom
- More countries or chain business accept it

Overall, the Lightning Network is growing rapidly because it is making Bitcoin more useful for everyday payments. As more businesses and people start to use it, we can expect to see even more growth in the years to come.

average channel balance 0.082 BTC
average node balance 0.352 BTC

so not sure why you reference 17btc, but lets instead use some known stats

yes on average for each sat payment the router charges 0.000050sat/sat  + 0.5sat base of total
so yes for each full use before rebalance would earn them 0.005% per session
but if they rebalance each month
that average 0.082 earns 0.00000411 before rebalancing per month
however onchain rebalance(close open channel) is
close tx of ~17sat per vbyte of 208vbytes = 3536sat
open tx of ~17sat per vbyte of 208vbytes = 3536sat
which means 7072sat to rebalance meaning negative balance/no profit for onchain fee rebalancing

so yes people do offchain rebalance by backward paying themselves using another channel.. but the funny part about this is when you rebalance using the routing game.. the other participants then get unbalanced in their channels, so they then rebalance through you. and so a tennis ping pong effect is that most payments end up being rebalance gaming each other fighting to find a cohesive status quo with each other  (which explains why all of a sudden services are showing more payments.. but those payments end up being rebalance sessions of playing ping pong)

doomad.. lot of people talk about bridges and subnetworks.. only your dozen idiot brigade recruits want to think of LN as a penthouse level network not a basement/subway level network

there are more subnetworks then that, but doomad only promotes certain ones that he hopes to ass-kiss/fame-up to hope to get a commission, pat on the back for promoting only certain things

i know doomads PR strategy of subliminal messages to push trying to make LN sound like bitcoin2.0. or bitcoin+ or 'on top of' bitcoin meaning better then bitcoin.. but doomad is ignoring the rest of the community that avoid LN for good reason. they see the flaws, bug and bottlenecks. they see the broken promises. they see they wont ever make an income from being a router.
LN is insecure, buggy and cludgy.. its a lesser network, not a better one

when 29% of liquidity is "river" when bitfinex had similar numbers, you start to see majority of LN is not independent users. but centralised services


as for the IOU.. unconfirmed transactions are not confirmed/settled. meaning if its not settled on your key its not your funds.. thats rule one of bitcoin economics, so if someone writes a promise to pay but doesnt settle up then yes its an IOU until the promise is settled so yes the onscreen balance of msats is a nonbitcoin unit measure that promised but not settled. thus yes most definitely an IOU because you dont own real bitcoin settled value you instead have a promise measured in msats
you might want to look at how the 'states' are stored in wallet data.
an uncleared/unsettled cheque is still an IOU


maybe if there was less effort into FUDing bitcoin to try to claw people into LN and instead put effort into making a subnetwork that meets its promises, people would then be more then happy to use that niche subnetwork.. but just wasting 6 years with empty promises and false promotions pretending that it solves things.. the dream doesnt last long when people use it for a while. hit the bottlenecks and leave to try something else..they wake up.
satoshi dice system a decade ago done the same bad practice.. it didnt last

el salvador used LN for 3 months and gave it up due to many issues they experienced. they were sold a false promotion and regret trying it in the first place. they were told it was bitcoin and users can easily move bitcoin. but when they actually used it they were just playing with msats that got blocked at many node relays. which made millions of users blame bitcoin even though they never used bitcoin.. LN gave bitcoin a bad name and made millions of people not want to use bitcoin due to LN failures

there is many news media pictures of el salvadorians protesting against bitcoin even though the only experience el salvadorians had was bad experiences of LN

it makes me laugh how LN main devs support things like 'renting' channels (people pay to have a account able to receive funds)
it makes me laugh how i can make a "faster payments" fiat transfer for free but LN adorers love fee's and charging people amounts to move funds
these fee loving creeps want bitcoin transactions to be expensive so they can then charge people more on LN(if it ever got popular)

And you can't rely on fees in a network that can only operate in an on-chain manner, because it isn't attractive for the user. Unless you believe that paying $50 for a couple of transactions is sustainable and will definitely encourage people adopt it as currency.

I very much remember myself saying that the burden to run a full node isn't the problem but rather the risk to rip the network apart as a result of consensus failure.

Listen, I understand that this forum revisits topics often, but I've reached a point where I'm honestly tired of having this conversation. Here's a sincere question: have you ever considered taking tangible actions to address this? Complaining once in a while won't effect change. If you lack the requisite skills to develop software, have you explored alternative forks that align more closely with your beliefs?

Bitcoin LN would be ok, but currently also ordinary Bitcoin transactions can be fast enough for ordinary user, if receiver accept first confirmation for transfer ( ~ 10 minutes ), but transfer fees are too high of course. Bitcoin LN is not very popular, so I do not see any bright future, because of altcoins, which have very fast transfers, cheap transfer costs, even free ( TRX ).

you are correct huge fees would suck and harm btc.

stompix is correct small fees would suck and harm miners which would harm btc.

Satoshi whole theme is turning power into wealth


scrypt for LTC/Doge in the long term is better designed to help mining stay viable.

Does that mean scrypt will win out over Sha-256 I do not know.

And back to topic

the biggest LN node had 17 btc in it and generated 30 to 80 a month income for the owner of the node

that is an obvious fail. It won't last with those numbers. see below

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Now those are the stats from the guy running that node.

assuming that is true LN is a fucking disaster 17 btc earning only 30-80usd  a month is not viable.

Maybe someone can get stats for other 2 layer networks and maybe they are better.

But Franky1 will turn out to be correct about LN if LN only make 30-80 usd a month based on 17btc

I have been talking to a lot of LN Node runners basically they are not fans of what they are doing but they want to do some method to support BTC transactions.  As BlackHatCoiner mentioned there are a few other layer2 solutions I will be trying to research how well they work for the ones running them.

An LN runner is kind of like a POS for BTC and it is not going to scale and work with interest payments well under 1% a year.

At the moment any OG that has 100's of cheaper btc can afford to support it but that is not a longterm method. So if LN really works out it will need to pay about 2-4% to node runners. So that would be 8000 to 16000 a year to a 17 coin LN node not the 400 to 1000 it was paid last year.

No, and this is why probably we have a disagreement!
It's not the sum it's the quantity, even if you would have people opening a channel every 3 months and closing it 9 months after you still need the blockspace unless you opt for centralized solutions.

With the technical experience, I'm a bit less concerned, every single day that passes a new generation becomes the majority, far more technical, far more willing to explore this, if we look at the median age probably it looks to them just like setting up core was in 2010 to the generation without smartphones


Yeah pretty simple one, raise the block space in steps by doing a 4x by each havening, allowing both transactions on the chain to go by with 1-2 sat byte, reach a million in capacity, and leave enough room for another thing, from LN to consolidation unlike things are now, Bitfinex did one consolidation that with their hot wallet and they've dumped 10 blocks of transactions, one and a half hour of capacity!

I'm not advocating for only on chain, not for only LN either, not for blocks containing money or videos but also not for blocks in which one actor can spam it with $1 million. Equilibrium, that's what I'm proposing!