Lightning Network: Prospects, challenges, routes

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The block chains are very strong, but they are rather slow.

Imagine you're paying for an item, and you'll need to wait 10 seconds for the cashier to receive confirmation of payment after you swipe the card before you can leave. The rough 9 seconds are too long .

Now imagine that you are a handler running on a computer. You want to sell content, data, bandwidth, processor time, storage, or infrastructure access. Imagine that you need 10 seconds to obtain payment confirmation from another handler. Compared with your standard, the order of magnitude is inferior. This is insane. What you sell may be out of date when you receive a payment confirmation.

The coming software and software of autonomous trading machines to the machine (M2M) economy is an important part of the future global business. But the machine's requirements are very high. They want fast transmissions of almost 0 costs. Therefore, fast and low cost (micro) payment will become an important part of the M2M economy.

Block chains will become the IoT and M2M economy's hot-pay infrastructure. Combined with a stable currency, this technology will also become a viable candidate for human and machine payments.

But for the sake of feasibility, the payment system based on the block chain must be fast, cheap and scalable. These features are what the current block chain is not good at.

There are many extensibility methods such as fragmentation, side-connected, interactive authentication protocol or State channel. When these methods can potentially expand the overall trading capability, only the payment channel network, such as the Lightning Network, will also extend the low cost and low latency characteristics .

Our Vision is for machines to also provide a global infrastructure for fast, scalable, and inexpensive central payments for the human race. This is basically the original vision of Ching, but extends to the extensible and ready to support a world of thousands of different tokens of a particular kind. But what it looks like in practice.

Note that the following are random fictional stories.

Fast Forward 5 years, Bob is buying a cup of coffee. From his point of view, he just used his smartphone to pay for coffee, just like before. However, in the background, his wallet performs a number of tasks to complete the payment. It sends some moonbucks coupons, plus the user's preferred stable currency to pay for the coffee. The merchant sends back some faircoffeebuyer reputation coins, this coin is the wallet automatically to exchange under the local Streetworkersfund currency chain. Bob's wallet sends some awesomewalletcreator coins to its developers to pay for the cost of use. Interaction with the Lightning network do not run forever online Ethernet square full node and lightning passenger network home end, Bob's application also automatically pay reliable node some RDN coins as they provide for its etheric square eco-import service costs.

So when the machine is in the background of the complex business network to perform transactions and provide services based on a variety of currencies, users still have the perfect experience. Challenge

Payment Channel Network is still a very new idea and technology. They were first introduced about two years ago, and the block chains have been known for more than 8 years. Most importantly, they are very complex technologies in terms of concepts and implementations. For this, there is no specific specification to be seen through the Lightning Network and the Lightning Network.

The following points are still to be studied. Introduce them at a high level in this article, but in the future they all deserve a separate article of their own. Scalable Routing

The biggest problem is how to find the sender's path to the receiver in a global view without all channels and their availability and capacity. A highly efficient but centralized solution is for all participants to report their channel capacity to a centralized service continuously, and then ask the service to obtain the path. A central but not efficient alternative is to enforce the path by updating to all participants through a trial or error or broadcast channel. Through the so-called "Small World" network efficient routing model is present, but requires dynamic connection between nodes. A viable system needs to find the balance points in these methods. maintain a balanced network/cost

The path lookup algorithm should not give any path, but find the ideal path that reduces or at least avoids the increase of the channel and leads to uneven distribution of network channels. This can motivate people to find the cheapest path by announcing fees and help keep the network in balance. The simulation results show that the increase of cost and the imbalance of channel distribution greatly increase the life of the channel. maintain privacy while providing low latency information

Another important issue is protecting the endpoint privacy of all participants. To help with multiple indirect transmissions, participants need to have a hot wallet. In this setting, you'd better not expose your endpoints publicly. Therefore, a passive communication protocol such as Whisper is needed, but it also needs to be scalable to millions of users. Light Client

We assume that 99% of the participants will use the Lightning light client instead of using a full node to access the system. Similar to the current user using Metamask to access Dapps. Then there needs to be a protocol that supports weak connections as well as nodes that have less access to the network. delegate challenger when offline

The payment channel should allow either party to close the channel at any time. However, both parties must be online during the clearing period to announce the amount of money they receive. This is not feasible for common use cases, because people are mostly offline. So we need a centralized third-party system that motivates them to represent the offline side for liquidation. Upgradeable/Management

The escalation of the protocol may affect the millions of payment channels and their funding. It is impractical to expect end users to vote for technical agreement update proposals. Therefore, we need an efficient management mechanism to allow the transfer of voting rights to a group of experts. set up incentives to have an active backbone

We need a path lookup, monitoring, and full node service to the centralized network as the backbone of the system. The providers of these services should be paid to motivate them to provide services. At the same time, the core of the agreement should not have any cost other than the need to ensure network equilibrium. Test

It is very difficult to test a centralized, scalable point-to-point system. End-to-end testing with thousands of nodes is also difficult. It is more difficult to resolve all possible attack wizards. Testing is a large part of the development process of lightning network. Route

To keep you from getting bored with the specifics of the route, let's look at an obvious question: when it's ready.

We think Μraiden is ready and can be used for a lot of applications.

The answer to the Lightning network is a bit more complicated, but according to the original concept of lightning, the answer should be: "Once it supports the transfer between participants without a direct payment channel, and the software has been safely audited and deployed to the main chain, then it is ready". It took us 2 years, but we're about to reach that point. Add a security audit and deploy it to the main chain, and we're done.

But you know 80/20 rules. You can do 80% of the work in 20% of the time, and the remaining 20% of the work will take another 80% of the time to complete. Successful projects are to deliver the final 20% as much as possible to gain adoption and stay competitive.

There are also areas where lightning networks can and should be improved. For example, privacy, the efficiency of the search path, longevity of the channel, light client accessibility, shorter liquidation cycle, management mechanism, applicability and so on. Some of these must meet our standards for minimum viable products.

Fortunately, the Lightning network is designed to allow for the development of a number of parallel programs that can be improved on components. Although it takes time, research and effort, it is worth it.

For now, we have only discussed protocols and software. But in order to see the widespread use, the greater effort is to guide a healthy ecological environment around the Lightning network, allowing developers to choose the Lightning network when deciding to pay the infrastructure. Summary

The Thunder and lightning Network organization is growing. We recruit talented people from all over the world and continue to recruit. The Lightning network is a huge effort to try to become a reliable backbone of the global scalable payment to the center.

Developing this exciting new technology will require sweat, time and effort, but we are committed to making the vision of a fast, inexpensive, and scalable block chain based on payment a reality.

The Lightning Network project is led by Brainbot Labs EST.

Translation Author: Xu Li
Original address: Raiden Network:vision, Challenges and roadmap

Author: Lilymoana
Link: https://www.jianshu.com/p/955a74cd32d7
Source: Jianshu
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