Why including the History of the Lightning Network? about lnbook HOT 10 CLOSED

Giving credit where credit is due is important, but more importantly history is fun! Why would anyone read a boring book: )

from lnbook.

A lot of people seem to (mistakenly) think that the development history of the Lightning Network started in 2016 / 2017 as part of that particular scaling debate period. For that reason alone I think it is important to at least highlight a few earlier milestones, to show that discussion about it has been going on much much longer.

from lnbook.

It's quite a hard read I have to say. It's full of terminology that has not been explained for the reader to really understand it.

Fully agree. I am not in the phase of finalizing the text. Just writing first drafts to explore which path to go. So after writing that piece I realized I could have these two different perspectives. Let's assume I would decide for the first then Aaron's text is currently so much more accessible for a reader. For me writing is a highly iterative process which includes throwing away text and rewriting. But I can presteucture a text as much as I want to. Only when tasks formulating all the dependencies and topics really become visible. That being said I would be surprised if in its current firm the text would be easy to read

from lnbook.

Starting with a history part is a great way to get interested in the book. Given that a lot of books are never finished, I guess it is not a bad idea to build up some motivation first before jumping right into the very complicated lightning topic. It also helps to set some context for people who might not be familiar at all with bitcoins history.

from lnbook.

I think it's great to provide a high-level overview of the important parts of LN's history.

As a reader, I would expect the book to read like Mastering Bitcoin - i.e. I want the book to teach me what makes the Lightning Network work.

Going into too much detail on the history may dilute the "how it works" factor.

from lnbook.

Personally I think that history is not that important, especially trying to be chronological and complete. Instead, I would focus on the didactic aspects, as in the example of unilateral channels.

from lnbook.

Good issue to raise! My concern is that by using it as educational / diadatic purpose, you have to describe why the things that were invented are important. ie learning about Satoshi proposing nSequence is pointless if you don't know why it is important to sequence transactions.

I'm very impressed with the content so far, and my recommendation is to proceed with it. If we see that it doesn't fit later, then at least we have something we can easily condense for the "completeness" view

from lnbook.

That being said, and being read the history, it's quite a hard read I have to say. It's full of terminology that has not been explained for the reader to really understand it. Maybe it should be rephrased to be a bit more developer friendly.

from lnbook.

This question made me reach for my copy of Mastering Bitcoin, to see how it was handled there. The "History of Bitcoin" piece is quite high-level, and doesn't go into the level of detail that is being constructed for Mastering Lightning. - not for example explaining Adam Back's discovery of "proof of work"..

Agree on the iterative writing process! When I'm reading proposed pull requests, my thought process is not "is this perfect" but just "does this move it forwards"... If so, I'm good with it...

from lnbook.

We should have a high-level history in order to provide context. It will need to be more detailed than what was in Mastering Bitcoin, but does not need to be chronological and complete. It needs to show the motives, ideas and direction of development, providing context on why certain choices were made and how we ended up here.

from lnbook.