> No better way to "threat model" than to try it out in a hostile environment
You just answered my question, sorry to say.
I know the technical side somewhat well, and apparently have a thing for explaining the basics in layman's terms. I have a feeling I don't know what you mean by "threat modeling", but that doesn't mean nobody does. And your choosing to make sly comments instead of explaining yourself doesn't fill me with confidence that you are being completely impartial here...
I don't take that. I'd go on a limb to say the majority of readers here are familiar with the concept of threat modeling. Since you don't want to look-up the term, instead slighting me for using it: What is called a threat model is in reality a vulnerability model created by a formal process. In software development, there may not have been a single threat model created by security people that didn't expose vulnerabilities overlooked or not paid attention to by developers of the particular app in question. This is done from an attacker's perspective by people familiar with that perspective, instead of from a developer's perspective which usually doesn't notice vulnerabilities in their own design. This isn't a slight on the developers but that the attacker's mindset and the specialized knowledge of security people are not normally conjoint with general purpose devs.
> instead of explaining yourself doesn't fill me with confidence that you are being completely impartial here...
Impartial? That sounds silly to me, but I know there are tons of people who promulgate their cryptocurrencies and network addons without regard to reality. I'm not one of them. I no longer have any position in any coins, having sold my coins fully in the latest run-up, and am not a creator or anything of any of them.
By the way, you come across as pushing for lightening partially not impartially, since you have danced around the two points I made in my first post. You seem to be an apologist for the tech, not someone who wants to get the right tech implemented. I don't know why you accused me of being partial, when all I did was point out two issues with your statement and asked a question. In reality, you don't seem impartial and should disclose your stake in this tech.
But in that case, yes, there is a section of the whitepaper dedicated to risks and threats to the system, and throughout the entire whitepaper an attacker's perspective is taken when explaining most aspects of the system, as well as some "formal" dives into specific risks referenced.
>By the way, you come across as pushing for lightening partially not impartially
I am absolutely not impartial, I very much believe in this technology and want to help explain it. However I don't think that I have at any point mislead or misrepresented the technology.
That being said, i don't actually hold any BTC currently due to personal events in my life, however I most likely will in the relatively near future. (as a side note, I always laugh at comments like this. There is no way to prove if I own or don't own BTC, and I don't personally think it's very relevant to some comments on a forum. You may feel differently, but in my experience most "bias" isn't in the form of possible monetary gain, but from the need to be "right")
>you have danced around the two points I made in my first post
If you mean that the #1 makes LN "far from workable", I feel I spoke to that directly already in the direct reply.
As for the comment of:
> According to you own words, the answer to poor transaction times is to make transactions less reliable and to introduce centralization.
I didn't say that, and if I implied it, it was a mistake. i don't think I ever brought up blockchain times at all. Bitcoin transaction times (assuming you mean blocktimes) aren't "poor", they are long enough to reduce orphan blocks and short enough to allow transactions to complete in a reasonable amount of time. I never thought bitcoin (without LN) could ever replace money, but was instead a separate type of "money" that can be used in specific cases. LN expands the possibilities here, but as for what it will do or the impacts it will have, I don't know, and i don't pretend to know.
And I feel I spoke to the "reliability" and "centralization" directly as well, but didn't' explain myself.
LN transactions are just as reliable as blockchain transactions, more so in fact. A run-up of activity can cause blockchain transactions to be caught in the mempool out-bid by others for blockchain space unless RBF or CPFP are used, which are both cumbersome and in some cases impossible. LN has no such issues. You will know before you make your transaction if it will "complete", and you will know the max amount of time that you will need to wait for funds in the case of noncompliance, as well as how much you will get as a "bonus" in that case.
And the centralization aspect is also false, as the "network" part of LN makes it so that it's easy to route around a "centralized" hub if you need to for any reason, and the routing protocol increases privacy by making it impossible for the hub to know the source or destination of the transaction unless it is one of them. Fees are the incentive that make this whole network work, and for more information you can read some of my other comments in this post.
The questions you posed were based on false information that I didn't say, and were wrong in my opinion, which is why I didn't expand on my very direct answer of "Transactions in LN are just as "reliable", and don't introduce centralization in any meaningful way."
Anyway I feel this conversation is getting a bit more agressive than I'd like, so this will most likely be my last reply. You can read into that however you want.
