The Truth About The Lightning Network Will Shock You
How The LN Deception Marked Bitcoin’s Stagnation
The truth emerges as the dark clouds of deception evaporate.
As aggressive marketing is reduced and promotional activities shrink, rational thoughts arise.
Small rays of shining hope appear as the price of Bitcoin descends, and a store of value as the sole-purpose narrative collapses.
You cannot maintain speculation as an objective without deceptive strategies.
Maximalists promoted deceptive fairy tales, with the top one being the Lightning Network.
LN can not scale in decentralized form, a well-hidden fact by the (Bitcoin BTC) community.
Lightning is a distraction, while Central Banks and the fiat competition bring in a robust new money form, CBDCs, ready to dominate finance and payments at the cost of financial self-sovereignty.
Lightning Network: The Thing That Should Not Be!
For a community that has always worried about the block chain being taken over by an oppressive government, it is a rich irony. — Mike Hearn
The blocksize debate ended in 2015 with Blockstream developers taking control of the brand and effectively ousting or forcing the previous developers to resign from the project.
The small blocks’ side applied censorship and DOS attacks to accomplish the scaling stagnation of Bitcoin and the push of layer-2 solutions (sidechains).
One anonymous person with the moniker Theymos was remarkably controlling the flow of information.
From the early days Theymos attained total control of many top Bitcoin discussion places such as r/bitcoin, bitcointalk, bitcoin.org, and the Twitter account “@bitcoin”.
Theymos utilized this power, applying censorship during the blocksize debate.
While Andresen’s team promoted on-chain scalability, the Blockstream developers had other plans right from their beginnings in Bitcoin.
Peter Wuille (Blockstream co-founder) envisioned a for-profit company in charge of a network not directly connected to the bitcoin network since 2011.
Blockstream didn’t take long to form as a company, and eventually hijacked Bitcoin developments.
This was always the plan of the coalition of devs that ousted Gavin Andresen, Mike Hearn, and more early developers from the project.
Architecture Forcing Users To Custodians
The Lightning Network was expected in 18 months, although it took seven years before the first extensive trial with El Salvador. A fiasco with the enforcement and promotion of custodian wallets making little difference for the population.
LN contains various fatal technical flaws and centralization concerns limiting its use for low amounts.
David Shares tracks chronologically Lightning Network vulnerabilities, exploits, and critiques since 2015 at GitHub.
No code is perfect, although the critical vulnerabilities of LN raise concerns over its practical use case for global adoption as a payments mechanism.
Bitcoiners treat the Lightning Network as a testnet even after all these years, encouraging its use only with low amounts of BTC.
The Non-Functional Lightning Network
Give it 18 more months, and it still won’t work.
LN was always a distraction and a deception.
Blockstream planted LN to keep a part of the Bitcoin community, hoping that one day Bitcoin could reach global adoption. Those who understood what was going on either upgraded the network with Bitcoin Cash or created other projects.
Competition is fine as long as there’s a clear purpose. Bitcoin was on its way to disrupting the legacy financial system and promoting self-ownership and a money system for billions of people. True economic freedom.
It has been eight lonely years already for Lightning and it is still not ready, still not capable or reliable.
The low block size of layer 1 is detrimental to LN’s success.
It was not the scaling solution the Bitcoin community expected. Questions arise again regarding the block size increase, but that will translate to accepting defeat. Thus, it will never happen. The Bitcoin developers are popping champagnes as fees rise.
We are in a race, but the LN illusion supports only one agenda: CBDCs.
CBDCs will dominate with authoritarian financial force.
We can only envision a bleak future with this financial tool.
Bitcoin was co-opted to sustain the legacy financial establishment and alter the narrative. Bitcoin (BTC) devolved from a disruptive tool that empowered the individual, into a casino.
Hidden Centralized Architecture
It’s pointless to create a payment channel for the sole purpose of sending an off-chain transaction, since it requires an on-chain transaction to open the channel (and another one to close). You might as well just send an on-chain transaction instead; you don’t need the LN.
(source: Mathematical Proof That the Lightning Network Cannot Be a Decentralized Bitcoin Scaling Solution, by Jonald Fyookball)
Centralized banking hubs already control the feeble LN architecture, and we witness a rise in custodian (supervised and controlled by third parties) wallets.
Strike wallet, Chivo, Bitcoin Beach, Wallet of Satoshi, and dozens more popular Lightning wallets lack permissionless features.
Adam Back, with unparalleled chameleon debate techniques, will promote anything that (pro)fits Blockstream’s agenda.
To gain credibility, though, you have to answer the difficult questions instead of diverting from the topic.
Custodian third parties process most LN transactions already. Thus, LN already presents antithetical values to the whitepaper’s suggestion of a P2P network of payments.
We might wonder why Adam Back and many other BTC-maximalists promote custodians such as Celsius, centralized exchanges like Bitfinex, and the centralized stablecoin Tether — USDT.
All these custodian companies claim to support cryptocurrency but present a substantial threat to both the principles and adoption.
LN Can’t Scale Decentralized
Odds suggest there won’t be any soft or hard forks that will scale BTC in the future.
The world needs Bitcoin 2.0, but there are no more fixes left for BTC.
The upgraded version of Bitcoin is Bitcoin Cash, fast and inexpensive to use, free from the control of a small team, and free from the subjugation of a fee market.
LN provably can’t scale in a decentralized form, and even in a centralized form doesn’t offer any realistic alternative to the networks operated by banks.
People will not use a credit card to use another network of payments.
They will just use their credit card directly instead. No rational consumer is attracted to a complex payment network.
In Conclusion: LN Was A Deliberate Unessasary Distraction
LN was a distraction from the on-chain scaling progress of Bitcoin.
It was there to profit the devs that joined Bitcoin with a clear purpose of undermining the network and promoting a private agenda.
On numerous occasions, we witness shady anonymous individuals interfering with Bitcoin’s development, promoting shady purposes, and compromising Bitcoin with various means.
As WikiLeaks (in 2010) discovered the loophole Bitcoin opened up in an authoritarian financial establishment, a co-opt should have been expected.
It did not take long for the community to realize the vast disruptive potential of Bitcoin. Although, it took too long to realize such an attempt would find concentrated opposition from the legacy establishment.
LN was not just a bad idea, but one used to support the stagnation of Bitcoin’s blockchain. A bait to prevent Bitcoin from achieving global adoption.
Cover Picture: (background) by kummod on Pixabay, modified with more Pixabay images
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References:
- The Great Bitcoin Scaling Debate — A Timeline, by Daniel Morgan
- The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment, by Mike Hearn
- Mathematical Proof That the Lightning Network Cannot Be a Decentralized Bitcoin Scaling Solution, by Jonald Fyookball
- Lightning Network, by David Shares
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Originally published at https://read.cash.
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