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210 sats \ 6 replies \ @justin_shocknet 11 Mar \ on: Payments below dust limit not trustless lightning
Yes, here, every time I call scaling focused people with their fake L2's and shitfork proposals retards and scammers. It's also a long standing meme that millisats in Lightning are shitcoins.
There's nothing that can solve for the fact that if you do not have enough sats to make a chain transaction you are not using Bitcoin, because you literally can't.
Scammers pushing fake L2's like Ark claim they want to do so to scale to those that can't afford to use the chain, when that is in fact not possible because of this fundamental limitation. This "scale for the poors" virtue signal is the premise with which they attack Lightning and grift on its perceived underwhelming adoption: poors cannot afford Lightning channels because they are chain transactions.
Millisats for example in Lightning being is because they're meant to be used only for internal accounting and cannot be settled on chain, because the chain does not have floating point precision. The chain has a fixed supply of 2.1Q sats and that will never change, therefore the dust limit has an absolute floor.
This has 0 to do with high fees as fees could remain at 1 sat per byte forever and it would still take 5-6 digits of sats to be an economically viable sovereign user.
Reality is that given the distribution of Bitcoin it's effectively impossible to ever exceed a billion sovereign people/organizations due to the supply constraint and nothing more.
Actually payments via lightning below the dust limit are enforced, but only when the lightning payment is completed and the preimage has traversed the path to the sender and the channel states are updated. It is while the HTLC is in flight when what I am describing can happen.
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To be settled on chain however the output still needs to be of a transactable size, so even once settled you still effectively need a larger aggregate.
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Well, the output of the updated channel balance is exactly that. As I already stated that I am talking about the time when the payment is in flight.
You do know that without payments in flight there are two outputs in the commitment transaction, right? It goes without sating that these two outputs can be way bigger than any individual payment and way bigger than the dust limit. You also know that lightning updates the commitment transaction differently for payments above and below the dust limit, right?
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these two outputs can be way bigger than any individual payment
Of course, that's the aggregate of the channel state, the point is that until that channel state is transactable in size that it's inherently trusted.
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Hm... It is trusted because it can be enforced by force close. Payments above the dust limit can be enforced by the HTLC when force closing. The payments below this as far as I see are added to the miners fee in the commitment transaction so you can't really enforce it by force close. This may or may not be a real problem, but I haven't really seen it discussed.
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may or may not be a real problem
That's the point of my original response, there's no reality in which amounts smaller than what's transactable on-chain are trustless, whether its a problem or not is in the eye of the beholder as to what constitutes a material amount to them.