Is Lightning Network a banker controlled implementation of Bitcoin?

I wrote a little bit about this yesterday but after a long series of posts, I didn’t have enough time to do my due diligence on all the claims it’s made. I now feel more certain that this video is making mostly bogus claims.

(Google Images - Wikimedia Commons)

While I’m a programmer, I haven’t had the time to study Lightning Network code which is open source. Having code being open source is the surest way that we know that nothing nefarious exists in the implementation. Cypherpunks all over the world are constantly trying to stake their claim to fame by finding the one liner that the NSA snuck in. If the build is not consistent with the code, then the checksums won’t match and you know you’re dealing with a tampered file or executable.

This is the first issue that makes it very unlikely that banks can take over control of the hubs, but there’s more… A bitcoin public address on the blockchain looks like this…

(from blockexplorer.com)

You will see the bitcoin public address at the top, the transaction id’s (there are only two at this address), and the encumbrances showing the source and destination.

Do you see any fields that have attached a social security number, name or phone number, etc? No. This is why exchanges like Coinbase have KYC (Know Your Customer) and AML (Anti Money Laundering). They have to have knowledge of the originating address to know who that address belongs to.

So if these LN hubs are going to operate as a "bank", then when you send a transaction from your hardware wallet whose address has never been used before, they will have to insert a form in between each transaction to collect your social security number, your name, address, etc. Will you fill this form out?

I decided to demonstrate how ridiculous this is by showing you what I would do as a programmer in my Delphi IDE to try to request this information…

My understanding of hubs so far is a bit different. They aren't supposed to be operated by anybody but represent a pool of assets from many different resources that search for routes to settle direct P2P in the event that one party doesn't have enough bitcoin to settle a transaction between two parties.

If I was programming bitcoin Lightning Network nodes I would just set up a class with the records of all open channels and call it a THub object. This THub would have a dynamic array of all the open channels and the amounts. It would probably need a binary sort search procedure that orders the amounts of each of the channels from greatest to least, so that settlement chains could be found in the hierarchy chain.

Imagine this situation. Suppose someone in front of you in line at a convenience store has a $100 bill and you're behind them and they are talking to the merchant who doesn't have enough change to cover it. You overhear the conversation and instead of trading with the merchant directly, what I've done is given five twenty's to the customer in front of me in exchange for that $100 bill (+ 10 cent fee). Then the customer can complete the transaction with the merchant for one of his $20’s instead. In this situation I operated as a hub. I didn't ask for his name, social security number, phone number, etc.

So the simple solution is this. If you've never provided KYC info on yourself and a node pops up asking for KYC, just say no. If you don’t provide this information, then authority has to guess at it by following the address chains.

So why would someone put forth this conspiracy theory? Ask who benefits (cui bono). In this case, since we know that there's been a bitcoin civil war going on for more than a year about how to scale bitcoin, it looks like something cooked up by a BCH supporter.

Personally I'm not against larger block sizes, but there really is an important reason for doing scaling right this time:

Eventually the market will decide who's right.

---

Donations (public bitcoin address):

3FwxQsa7gmQ7c1GXJyvDTqmT6CM3mMEgcv

---

---