Why Bitcoin Lightning viewers are not what they seem

Data viewers have become a favorite tool for Bitcoin users eager to tell the story of the ongoing adoption of payment technology in development. A ton of visualizers have already been launched to represent the network in novel ways, from 3D representations and historical time series, to genealogical trees and experimental animations.

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Observing how nodes and channels are deployed in complicated networks has become something of a sport for Lightning fans.

"I used to check the Bitcoin price every day, but now I check the Lightning Network nodes," wrote one enthusiast on Reddit, adding that, unlike price charts, Lightning is always on an upward trend.

But according to several developers who work on implementations of this network, the images do not tell the whole story.

"Most snapshots will become increasingly irrelevant," said Olaoluwa Osuntokun, CTO and co-founder of Lightning Labs. On the one hand, images are based on views from a single node, which has limited access to the entire network.

"It is not authoritative, it is not really indicative of the longer term topology," Osuntokun continued.

However, images at this time play an important role, often to get an idea about how the network is growing, that is, if Lightning is fulfilling its promise of decentralization.

The pseudonymous developer "Intel", which created the popular #recksplorer viewer , agreed, saying that these tools are the easiest way to observe the growth of the network at this point.

Intel continued :

"You can visually compare what they looked like before and look now, making the growth of the network really remarkable. It's much nicer than sharing raw numbers of network nodes. "

An incomplete photo

Still, according to Osuntokun, as the network continues to grow, these visual representations will become more problematic.

Although users sometimes complained about the lack of visibility throughout the network, thinking that it was due to a faulty code, the partial view of the nodes is a necessary feature, as it improves privacy and reduces node storage costs individual

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In addition, due to certain implementation parameters, if a channel has been inactive for more than two weeks or if it contains a very small amount of funds, it may not be visible to all nodes. There would also be nodes and channels that are not announced at all.

"Actually, it is optional that nodes send authenticated evidence that certifies the existence of a channel," said Osuntokun.

Even views in layers from multiple nodes would not give you a complete picture.

Tyzbit, the pseudonymous author of several interactive Lightning visualizers, compared this to a dark room full of people, with groups of people hidden behind others.

"You do not need to know of everyone in the room to send money to someone, you just need a work route," tyzbit explained. "Nobody has a perfect image of the network."

According to Osuntokun, although that might worry people that the network is not really growing as fast as some suggest, it actually shows the more positive side.

In Lightning there is no need for consensus, or a global agreement of what is the network, it is even possible that several unconnected lightning networks can exist at the same time. With this in mind, it is likely that the total network may be much larger than that represented in the images.

The end of the visualizers

Visualizers can have a short lifespan, anyway.

On the one hand, Osuntokun said that as Lightning adds more privacy features, viewers will not be able to collect more specific data, such as physical location, on the nodes. This is obviously a benefit for the users, since the data about their location could expose them to attacks, but at the expense of the visual tools.

"As the graph gets bigger and bigger, the visualizations will probably start to collapse the channels to reduce the dimensionality of rendering," Osuntokun said, "otherwise, things will end up looking like a ball of yarn very soon."

Intel echoed this point, indicating that the visualization software will eventually not be able to handle the number of overlaps in the network.

"A large Lightning network becomes a tangled mess, and there's no way you can untangle it for viewing purposes," he said.