Tag: lightning

Is there a reason that Bitcoin Core won’t add built-in support for Lightning Network, is it dead, and what is the real website?

I’ve spent a lot of time recently trying to understand what Bitcoin Lightning is. It appears as if the main website for it is this: https://www.bitcoinlightning.com/

However, the site feels extremely “commercial” and sketchy, full of typos and dubious claims/language.

The only other site I can find is https://lightning.network/ , which has a way more “community-y” domain name, but almost goes to the other extreme in that it’s entirely devoid of anything useful. Extremely barebones and uninviting. Empty.

I frankly did not get this feeling about the Lightning Network until today. I’ve heard about it for years, but not in a long time. Is it dead/failed at this point? Even after reading the entire introduction, I just have no idea how I would actually use it.

To me, this seems like vaporware. Just like I could not figure out how to actually use Ethereum to actually do anything, or even download a single sensible client.

What is the problem with “Lightning”, really? Do the main Bitcoin developers/controllers have different ideas for the future of Bitcoin? I feel like I have to pull every bit of information out from people, and as if they expect me to automatically understand what to do.

Once again, I have to ask: Am I missing something? Is this promising-sounding thing a… thing?

lighting – Why real time lightning fails to show shadows on terrain in Unity?

Flicking shadows on terrain can often be fixed by adjusting the “Bias” and “Normal bias” of the light source. However, adjusting those settings does have side effects, so you should pay attention to how the settings affect your shadows in different areas (especially on high-detail objects close to the camera). In the worst-case scenario, you might have to use tricks, like rendering nearby objects with one camera/directional light, and distant objects with a different camera/directional light, to get close and distant objects to both look right.

Other possible causes of flickering shadows:

  • The camera’s near clipping plane is set too low (it should usually be at least 0.3 and may need to be set higher if the far clipping plane is very large).
  • The camera is very far away from the world center (more than 100,000 units if I remember correctly).

Baked lighting doesn’t cast real-time shadows (e.g. character shadows) because it’s baked. Baking your lighting essentially renders the shadows into a texture that is applied on top of the meshes. For traditional baked lighting, there’s very little performance cost but it’s completely static. However, you can combine real-time and baked lighting using mixed lighting.

Baked and real-time lighting are important concepts, so if you weren’t already familiar with the differences between them, you should take some time to thoroughly read the Unity documentation on the different lighting modes.

How does muun lightning wallet requires no trust and no backups?

https://muun.com/ claims it has a wallet that does not rely on backups.

Here: https://blog.muun.com/why-not-just-a-mnemonic/ it says

Muun is a multisig wallet with lightning support, so backing up a
mnemonic alone would mean your bitcoin could be easily frozen.
Self-custodianship is at the core of everything we do, so this wasn’t
acceptable. We built an Emergency Kit that gives you full self-custody
of your money when combined with your Recovery Code[6].

Your Emergency Kit is a PDF document with the information and
instructions needed to find and spend your funds independently. No
need to brute-force any missing data. Everything is there, including
your private keys and output descriptors[7].

Your private keys are securely encrypted with your Recovery Code. This
makes your Emergency Kit harmless by itself: you can keep multiple
copies, and you can even store it safely on the cloud.

How can it, however, keep track of the state of my lightning wallet? If I use it to only spend, then there’s no problem. However, if I receive more than I spend, it’s of my interest to save the transaction state so I can propagate it when I want to close the channel.

I don’t see how this emergency recovery kit can help me recovering the state.

dnd 5e – Are there any good-aligned tempest gods with a portfolio focused on lightning?

In the Forgotten Realms pantheon, no.

None of the gods in the forgotten realms pantheon fit what you are looking for. Finding something closer to what you are after requires drawing from a different pantheon, or stepping into another setting entirely and allowing Neutrally aligned deities.

Norse Pantheon: Thor, Chaotic Good

Thor is the god of thunder having a chaotic-good alignment. It will be up to your DM, but the PHB has the following guidance concerning real-world pantheons:

The Celtic, Egyptian, Greek, and Norse pantheons are fantasy interpretations of historical religions from our world’s ancient times. They include deities that are most appropriate for use in a D&D game, divorced from their historical context in the real world and united into pantheons that serve the needs of the game.

Exandrian and Greyhawk Pantheons: Kord, the Storm Lord, Chaotic Neutral (Good in Greyhawk)

The Storm Lord of Exandria gives an option that is at least not evil.

Where thunder booms and conflict rises, prayers to the Storm Lord are shouted into the maelstrom. Reveling in all tests of strength, Kord blesses those who prove themselves on the battlefield. Worshiped by athletes and warriors all across Exandria, he exalts those whose force of spirit and desire for victory call his attention. He brings tumultuous storms over land and sea, and those who wish for clearer skies offer their praises and prayers to appease him.

Notably, Kord is also a part of the Greyhawk pantheon where he is considered Chaotic Good, though little details about him are given for that setting as D&D 5e does not have a Greyhawk campaign book yet.

Theros Pantheon: Keranos, God of Storms, Chaotic Neutral

Keranos is described:

Keranos is the god of storms and wisdom. Merciless and impatient, Keranos is equally likely to strike out at mortals with a bolt of inspiration or a blast of lightning. To revere Keranos is to exult in the power of wisdom, clarity of purpose, and the fury of the storm. He is favored by tinkerers, inventors, and sailors as well as those seeking solutions to intractable problems. He doesn’t tolerate the company (or the worship) of fools, and he despises vapidity and indecision.

lightning network – Why are `update_add_htlc` and `commitment_signed` separate messages?

The commitment_signed message is also used at other places to move forward channel state. The entire process is not only described in BOLT02 but also in Mastering lightning

https://github.com/lnbook/lnbook/blob/366a65b33045cbb9e95a3d4060005c240f1f1778/channel-operation.asciidoc

There you can see that after Alice sends and update_add_htlc message and a commitment_signed message Bob will later in the protocol also send a commitment_signed message so that Alice can also move forward her state. Remember Bob and Alice both have an asymmetrical version of the commitment transaction for each state and both need a signature from the other side. It would be strange if Bob replied with an update_add_htlc message to send over signatures even though he does not want to add an htlc.

So yes while signatures could have been included in the update_add_htlc message we still would have needed the commitment_signed for Bob to reply. Also when stetteling htlcs the commitment_signed messages are needed again. I guess in that way it seems more reasonable to make the exchange of signatures explicit with its own message instead an reusing it. But of course that was a choice that could have been taken differently.

Is an SSD required to run a bitcoin full node and a lightning node?

A SSD is not required for running Bitcoin, but it certainly helps. You would definitely want one if you were running a production service using Bitcoin, but for something you’re using personally it will just make synchronization substantially slower to use a hard drive. For a Raspberry Pi you absolutely do not want to be storing any data on the Micro SD card it uses as a boot disk, as this will result in corruption at some point.

lightning network – Why does the block explorer show a different fee rate than what I selected in my wallet app?

Feerates on the Bitcoin network are expressed in sats/vbyte (where vbyte is bytes, but taking the segregated witness discount into account). blockchain.com shows sats/byte (where byte refers to the actual number of bytes used to serialize the transaction); this metric is meaningless for fee estimation purposes.

blockchain.com doesn’t show sats/vbyte directly, but you can compute it from the sats/WU that they do show (1 vbyte = 4 WU, so N sats/WU means 4N sats/vbyte).

I recommend using a different block explorer (or none at all; your own wallet will tend to give you more correct interpretations, without needing to trust a single site).

See also: https://murchandamus.medium.com/psa-wrong-fee-rates-on-block-explorers-48390cbfcc74

c lightning – Pay private bolt11 via sendpay

I need to get fee, before send payment.
BOLT11:

root@855e20daeae9:/# lightning-cli --testnet decodepay lntb1u1p07t3tdpp5ax3hk4jzf08sn8a8dupayswf6ja497mj25lmcdqn7m0ce22ch0qqdq8vankwecxqrrss9qy9qsqsp5f5s9kqwnp7uh3pg93wr970420xy7vueelqhratwlrt9jzvn2lv7srzjqwfn3p9278ttzzpe0e00uhyxhned3j5d9acqak5emwfpflp8z2cng8xmauqqq0gqqqqqqqlgqqqqqeqqjqatpu8h3tcatdvvxl0t93zkltwlpzaqlu75sgrh3vv92utfqaq6gpgmyaks48v5tptmc30yaach48pr3l3dfnhm5ytr5my8z87xjmnpcqmjh036
{
   "currency": "tb",
   "created_at": 1608893805,
   "expiry": 3600,
   "payee": "03aba9dfe8612755f6edc363b90e3f1f4a684517cd0558452fb9620ffaebab683e",
   "msatoshi": 100000,
   "amount_msat": "100000msat",
   "description": "gggg",
   "min_final_cltv_expiry": 18,
   "payment_secret": "4d205b01d30fb97885058b865f3eaa7989e67339f82e3eaddf1acb21326afb3d",
   "features": "028200",
   "routes": [
      [
         {
            "pubkey": "03933884aaf1d6b108397e5efe5c86bcf2d8ca8d2f700eda99db9214fc2712b134",
            "short_channel_id": "1891311x61x0",
            "fee_base_msat": 1000,
            "fee_proportional_millionths": 100,
            "cltv_expiry_delta": 144
         }
      ]
   ],
   "payment_hash": "e9a37b56424bcf099fa76f03d241c9d4bb52fb72553fbc3413f6df8ca958bbc0",
   "signature": "3045022100eac3c3de2bc756d630df7acb115beb77c22e83fcf52081de2c6155c5a41d06900220146c9db42a7651615ef11793bdc5ea708e3f8b533bee8458e9b21c47f1a5b987"
}

Then i need to get route:

getroute id msatoshi riskfactor [cltv] [fromid] [fuzzpercent] [exclude] [maxhops]

Final node ID:

root@855e20daeae9:/# lightning-cli --testnet getroute 030f1784fafe1b5b143e4e4545e6c2f612943c60e6a5b770b35e324c60b6ae9516 10000000 10
{
   "route": [
      {
         "id": "03933884aaf1d6b108397e5efe5c86bcf2d8ca8d2f700eda99db9214fc2712b134",
         "channel": "1900118x8x0",
         "direction": 1,
         "msatoshi": 10002000,
         "amount_msat": "10002000msat",
         "delay": 178,
         "style": "tlv"
      },
      {
         "id": "03d5e17a3c213fe490e1b0c389f8cfcfcea08a29717d50a9f453735e0ab2a7c003",
         "channel": "1834823x53x0",
         "direction": 0,
         "msatoshi": 10000000,
         "amount_msat": "10000000msat",
         "delay": 34,
         "style": "tlv"
      },
      {
         "id": "030f1784fafe1b5b143e4e4545e6c2f612943c60e6a5b770b35e324c60b6ae9516",
         "channel": "1722566x108x0",
         "direction": 1,
         "msatoshi": 10000000,
         "amount_msat": "10000000msat",
         "delay": 9,
         "style": "tlv"
      }
   ]
}

which id should i use to get the route fot private BOLT11?

how to pay private BOLT11 in manual mode?

charging – What’s the maximum wattage that can be used to charge AirPods – both via Lightning and wirelessly?

Unlike iOS devices, I haven’t been able to easily find the answer to this. Is there any official documentation from Apple or any test results that outline the maximum wattage that AirPods will accept whilst charging – both via Lightning and when charging the case wirelessly?

Running both bitcoind and bitcoin-qt for use with lightning

I’ve been toying around with bitcoin & lightning nodes.

I like having the Bitcoin Core Qt GUI around for things, but also like being able to change specific configuration / startup flags (maybe eventually contributing) with the source + bitcoind.

My proposed solution is to download Qt GUI (current version 0.20.1) and then get the same version from github and share the same bitcoin chain database.

To do this, I want to have the same version. Is this as easy as:

# I downloaded 0.20.1 .dmg file from Bitcoin Core and installed it, thus I need that tag from Github
git clone https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin.git
git checkout tags/0.20.1
# ... do build here

Then, depending on what I’m doing I run either 1) Qt, or 2) bitcoind, but never at same time.

Any additional steps I need to do to check the versions are the same? Is there an easier way to achieve this? Maybe it’s just safer to build Qt stuff myself…