Hello Steemians :) Suppose you follow the market place that flows beneath you from the top of a tower. You have a button at hand; this button informs the victim if a seller or buyer is trying to cheat at the moment you press it. The victim may then punish you or take back his wages.
This assumption is simple, but shows how the most important parts of the Lightning network work. The lightning network is a complex layer that will provide processing transitions for bitcoin and is still in development. Lightning, one of the most promising developments to increase bitcoin's processing capacity and reduce user costs, has recently garnered great interest from users and developers. Some of them even began to consider the more advanced components of this network. Olaluwa, founder of the Lightning Labs startup, “Laolu” Osuntokun, partly pioneered the concept of ‘observation tower’, among the first to be discussed. During the Osuntokun interview, Lightning Labs announced that they were doing their first work on a ‘surveillance tower’ that would be provided by outside individuals or organizations to monitor the channel for fraud.
Osuntokun's first goal is to create a simple system that will replace things for the time being and do not require any response.’ quoth.
But the ultimate goal is greater than that. Osuntokun plans to set up a "market" on Lightning network that will match users who can pay small fees through these surveillance towers and provide other services that help the network work.
Osuntokun:
‘Users should be encouraged. It is a form of strong encouragement that they pay for the data they store. I think everyone who wants to outsource surveillance is entitled to it.’
At The Watchtower
Roughly, the concept of the observation tower is derived from the controversial mechanism of lightning network. Even if lightning works instantly, in the event of a dispute – for example, if a fraudster tries to steal money from another user – the victim will have time to block the action. However, in order for users to capture such fraud, they have to follow lightning's accounts carefully.
Tadge Dryja, co-author of lightning, sums it up as follows: "the price of scalability is to be cautious forever.’
However, if lightning becomes the preferred transition channel for daily bitcoin transactions, this caution can be quite troublesome. Therefore, the concept of ‘observation tower’ allows users to ensure this ‘infinite vigilance’ from the outside. This may seem strange to some, as a result, the Lightning network is being developed to disrupt bitcoin's ‘unreliable’ qualities. But in this way, users do not have to rely on a single person to secure or approve their transactions. Because Osuntokun and other lightning developers predict a system in which users can connect to as many watchtowers as they want at once. Thus, users do not have to reputation one person and prevent potential risks. According to osuntokun, if a single watchtower moves reliably, the system will operate properly.
One of the steps developers plan to take in the long run is to make both components – market and surveillance towers – invisible to bitcoin users.
Osuntokun: ‘ideally, the end user must have been isolated from all of this.’ quoth. He added, however, that more experienced ‘master users’ have the opportunity to build and operate their own towers.
Difficult Slopes
Osuntokun's observation towers are important. However, it is noteworthy that the concept has not been added to the features that define how the lightning network works. Indeed, the idea on this issue is so New that there is no consensus on dealing with the hurdles yet. First, developers are trying to make their watch towers more scalable. For example, suppose a watch tower wants to watch more than one channel, perhaps thousands of channels at the same time. Depending on how many channels the watchtower is watching at the same time, this database may be larger than the whole bitcoin and blockchain itself – which is already experiencing synchronization and storage problems in this area.
Osuntok is trying to create a better, easier-to-manage Tower system. His research was carried out in January under the heading of "Hardening Lightning" at Stanford blockchain conference.
‘One of our goals is to make outsourcing more scalable, so that they can serve more customers.’ he explained.
Osuntok has proposed a new plan for which towers will store less data for the same security level, and is trying to adopt a new bitcoin transaction code to simplify lightning data. Bitcoin's development process is slow, but Osuntokun at the end of the year hopes to add this new feature, he said.
Apart from scalability, another aspect of the watchtowers is more controversial – user incentives.
Although osunokun has mentioned the price market, other developers are not sure how to configure the system to create the best incentives. Dryja, for example, argued that the concept of surveillance Tower does not really require a wage structure, and, in part, only one honest surveillance Tower would be sufficient to keep the network safe. He said that a single observation tower is good enough for the safety of the entire lightning system, and it won't be surprising that many users actually manage honest towers. Dryja argued that if lightning actually worked in practice, the observation towers would rarely have to punish bad actors because those who broke the rules would lose their money.
In addition,:
‘I think it would be almost impossible to close the invalid channels. The fun part is, the risks are very high and the profits are very low.’
