>So really “Segregated Witness” is about segregated signatures. Why the wacky name with the word “witness” then? I’m not sure… I think Bitcoin people just love inventing jargon.<p>Witness is standard term in cryptography, Bitcoin people did not invent it. For instance a signature can be a witness to the fact that you hold a particular private key[0].<p>>I am also confused about the security properties of the Lightning Network. What happens when one of the hubs gets popped? Can someone steal all of the unsettled transactions? Suddenly this proposed scaling element starts taking on the security properties of Bitcoin exchanges, which are notorious for being popped.<p>If "a hub gets popped" the attacker should be not be able to steal the unsettled transactions. If we were trusting the hubs, like say how we trust coinbase, the LN would be much much easier to design.<p>[0]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_knowledge" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_knowledge</a>
>I am also confused about the security properties of the Lightning Network. What happens when one of the hubs gets popped? Can someone steal all of the unsettled transactions? Suddenly this proposed scaling element starts taking on the security properties of Bitcoin exchanges, which are notorious for being popped.<p>No, the whole point of LN transactions is that you do not need to trust intermediary nodes, or 'hubs', as he calls them. Every transactor has a copy of a valid Bitcoin transaction that will settle payments owed to them and these debts are collaterized by lock-timed money on the blockchain. It is theoretically totally secure.
The whole blocksize debate is pretty strong evidence IMO that bitcoin's leadership is completely broken. They took what was a trivial to implement, obviously correct (in the sense of program correctness) fix: double the block limit. And turned it into two complicated solutions that do little to address the underlying issue.<p>It's hard to imagine a more clearcut example of exactly the sort of bad engineering practices that will doom any project.<p>Ethereum on the other hand has serious issues, but they seem fixable. If Vitalik is willing to seriously rethink the design of Solidity and make greater efforts towards formally verifiable contracts, and then they get proof of stake working, I think there's some chance it could actually achieve some of the hopes of cryptocurrency enthusiasts. Unfortunately i'm not sure how willing they are to modify the language to make it more verifiable.
I tried to read and understand the Lightning Network paper recently. Glad I'm not the only one:<p><i>If I’ve gotten anything wrong here, it’s because the Lightning Network is ridiculously complex: the paper is some 57 pages written in blockchainiac gobbledygook terminology. I’m the sort of person who reads academic papers for fun, and can attest that this is not a paper I remotely purport to understand or enjoyed reading. I think there are very few people on Planet Earth who have read this paper and understand it.</i><p>If you're one of these Very Few People and you're reading this, a question: do Lightning's channels only reduce on-chain transaction volume in the case of recurring payments (eg subscriptions)? What is the anticipated savings if the Lightning Network is rolled out -- how much of current transaction volume could be handled in channels?
Tallying pages, flowcharts and formal specifications is no basis for scientific evaluation.<p>Coming from a Bitcoin background, I found the Lightning paper quite a refreshing read compared to pure academia papers. The ideas behind are very clever, several implementations are under way and implementors are building interoperability standards along the way (<a href="https://github.com/lightning-core/lightning" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/lightning-core/lightning</a>).
Somewhat off topic, could someone post a list or examples of non-trivial (or relatively, non-trivial) decidable languages that have implemented compilers/interpreters? I should say no requirement on supported hw architectures, nor currently active development/maintenance.
Bitcoin's challenges seem to be a matter of current implementation, while Ethereum just seems like a bad idea, implemented as well as a fundamentally bad idea could be.
Can someone explain to me how these decentralized systems make our current system more economically efficient? I just cannot see why anyone would actually use it outside of the illegal market.