ETHEREUM’S RAIDEN VS BITCOIN’S LIGHTENING – What’s happening? - Mortal Kombat or friendly race to the moon?

Hello fellow steemians and crypto investors,

Remember the moon race? Back in the 60’s the most powerful world powers that have ever existed got locked into a space race that would end up with one of them defeated, well sort of..., and the other one victorious and on the moon, collecting dust, literally...

In the end, looking back at history, I believe we all benefited because of the lessons learned, the new technologies that came out it, which eventually found their way to us consumers. If this was achieved by always inefficient and corrupt governments, I can only imagine how far we would have gone if this had been done by the private market, unencumbered by politics and regulations.

Today, I can’t avoid but drawing parallels with the current race going on in the crypto space:

The race this time is for a functional second layer scalability solution that rivals the Visa Network in transactions per second, with fees so small, that we would all be finally able to drink that mythical coffee drink, and pay micro-transactions without any worries.

This would just be the tip of the iceberg as there will be many applications for these new technologies we can’t possibly imagine now, just like we couldn’t image Facebook and Uber in the 90's.

There’s a lot at stake in this race because whoever gets there first will definitely have a strong beach head into the next 200 years of finance and world commerce.

However, very smart people, rather than seeing this as a race that will lead to a “Mortal Kombat”, believe this will be more of a friendly sparring between beasts that inhabit different realms:

Bitcoin and Ethereum: The Lion and The Shark by Andreas M. Antonopoulos

Andreas M. Antonopoulos is a technologist and serial entrepreneur who has become one of the most well-known and well-respected figures in bitcoin

So, what do you think? Will this be “Mortal Kombat” or a “Lion and Shark” friendly kind of race?

Please leave your comments below. We can all benefit from the crowd knowledge and be better positioned for the future! Feel free to dissent!!!

More information on the latest developments in this race:

Ethereum's Raiden Scaling Solution Just Passed Another Milestone
www.coindesk.com - Sep 6, 2017

A test network has been deployed for the Raiden project, a proposed scaling solution for ethereum designed to allow faster payments and lower fees.

Revealed on the Raiden GitHub page yesterday, the testnet is a major milestone for the project, one that will lead to the next phase of development before the code is ready to launch on the live ethereum network.

As with bitcoin, scaling is becoming an issue for the number two cryptocurrency by market capitalization. As more users make more transactions, the amount of traffic has the potential to slow up the network. Compounding the issue is that many ICO tokens are being launched on top of ethereum, bringing in sudden floods of traffic as sales take place.

Raiden – which has been in discussion since 2015 – is one part of ethereum's solution to that problem. Inspired by bitcoin's Lightning Network, the technology would shift the majority of transactions off of the ethereum blockchain to create an alternate network of peer-to-peer payment channels.

As previously reported by CoinDesk, the network is intended to massively increase transaction speeds, potentially enabling over a million transactions per second.
Raiden also accommodates the exchange of tokens and features an API to facilitate interactions with decentralized applications.

Reactions to the news of the testnet on Reddit were generally positive, though some raised the specter of centralization, with Raiden being likely to operate via payment hubs. Others responded that institutions are most likely to require the transaction throughput of off-chain payments, and that most private transactions would remain on-chain.

Bitcoin's Lightning Network Moves Closer to Compatibility
www.coindesk.com - Aug 25, 2017

Nearly a year after bitcoin's scattered group of Lightning Network developers first gathered to unite their different implementations, the rules they could one day use to connect their technologies are almost complete.

In interviews, those involved with the open-source project (viewed as one of the best ways to bring additional capacity to the nearly $70 billion network), spoke to the new sense of direction provided by bitcoin's recent SegWit upgrade.

Still, they also cautioned that, while SegWit lays the foundation for Lightning, standards are needed to connect work that's already been done.

"The specification is mostly complete, with minor amendments and inconsistencies that we are figuring out," said Blockstream engineer Christian Decker, co-author of an early Lightning research paper at ETH Zurich.

Put another way, if each Lightning implementation used different technologies, then the networks wouldn't be able to "talk" with one another, and thus wouldn't be useful for sending payments across the network. (Alice would not be able to send to a payment to Bob if he were using another, incompatible network.)

Lightning engineers, however, are almost done drawing up the standards. Lightning Labs CEO and co-founder Elizabeth Stark told CoinDesk:

"The specification isn't 100% at 1.0 yet, but it's very close."

Building BOLTS

While this marks a major step for the second-layer payment network, however, there are plenty of other steps still to take.
The open-source GitHub specifications, comprised of 11 Lightning "BOLTs," now describe the technical details that all implementations need to work on, such as transaction formats and how messages should be passed across the network.

The most obvious next step is translating these BOLT rules into actual code, though work here is also well underway. (MIT Digital Currency Initiative and bitcoin startups ACINQ, Blockstream and Lightning Labs are all currently coding up implementations that obey these rules.)

Additionally, Decker said he is working on a tool that tests how well the Lightning implementations work together. As Lightning developers finish coding up what's in the specifications, this will allow them to test whether they're truly compatible.

However, while it's "moving along nicely," Decker said the tool, just like the other parts of the Lightning Network, is still in progress.

Sources:
www.coindesk.com: Ethereum's Raiden Scaling Solution Just Passed Another Milestone

www.coindesk.com: Bitcoin's Lightning Network Moves Closer to Compatibility

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Tell me what you think of this post in the comments below. This is not professional investment advise. I'm not your financial advisor. Only invest money you can afford to lose!

Happy crypto investing!