Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] On the scalability issues of onboarding millions of LN mobile clients

From: Lloyd Fournier <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 5 May 2020 23:16:01 +0800

On Tue, May 5, 2020 at 9:01 PM Luke Dashjr via bitcoin-dev <
[email-masked]> wrote:

> On Tuesday 05 May 2020 10:17:37 Antoine Riard via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> > Trust-minimization of Bitcoin security model has always relied first and
> > above on running a full-node. This current paradigm may be shifted by LN
> > where fast, affordable, confidential, censorship-resistant payment
> services
> > may attract a lot of adoption without users running a full-node.
>
> No, it cannot be shifted. This would compromise Bitcoin itself, which for
> security depends on the assumption that a supermajority of the economy is
> verifying their incoming transactions using their own full node.
>

Hi Luke,

I have heard this claim made several times but have never understood the
argument behind it. The question I always have is: If I get scammed by not
verifying my incoming transactions properly how can this affect anyone
else? It's very unintuative.  I've been scammed several times in my life in
fiat currency transactions but as far as I could tell it never negatively
affected the currency overall!

The links you point and from what I've seen you say before refer to "miner
control" as the culprit. My only thought is that this is because a light
client could follow a dishonest majority of hash power chain. But this just
brings me back to the question. If, instead of BTC, I get a payment in some
miner scamcoin on their dishonest fork (but I think it's BTC because I'm
running a light client) that still seems to only to damage me. Where does
the side effect onto others on the network come from?

Cheers,

LL