| ▲ | tsimionescu 2 days ago | |
That's only true if they observe the channel being fraudulently closed in the right time window. You have to actively monitor the BTC chain to see if your Lightning network partner might steal from you. If you don't (e.g. There is some network or power issue and they take this opportunity to steal), tough luck. Basically Lightning is like a tab that you open in a bar. You perform various transactions on the tab, and only settle later. No one would say that you're using Visa when you tell the bartender to put some drink on your tab, even though at the end of the day or week or whatever, the transaction will go through Visa. | ||
| ▲ | nout a day ago | parent [-] | |
Bar tab is so very bad analogy here that breaks for multiple reasons: - At the bar is almost always a single direction: customer pays the bar. Lightning is both directions - sending money between friends and sometimes to shops. - In this (bad) analogy bitcoin would not be Visa, but bitcoin would be "dollars". Both the bartender and customer would say that they are using dollars for the tab. - The tab analogy doesn't really match the fact that you establish a "channel" (e.g. both you and the bartender would put some bitcoin into this channel and then you can pay your grandmother in another country with bitcoin in this channel... see the analogy doesn't work here), you can resize ("splice") the channel if you want, you can swap in and swap out... In most solutions your wallet monitors the chain and it automatically resolves any of the dispute (e.g. Phoenix wallet, or Zeus). The time scale is also different, so even if power goes out for multiple days and you are running your own very private wallet without any associated service (LSP), then you still have on the order of weeks for your wallet to automatically resolve any issue. | ||