Nostr Web Client

Lighting absolutely does not take 5-10 seconds to settle a payment. Looking at payments from one of the largest custodial providers settlements are *way* faster than that most of the time.

Sure, if you’re sending from a shitty node that doesn’t have good pathfinding[1] then it can take a bunch of retries and a while, but, like, don’t do that? Cashu could take 5 seconds if you hit bad Tor relays, but, again, like, don’t do that 🤷‍♂️.

[1] https://lightningdevkit.org/blog/ldk-pathfinding/ nostr:note1ga0k4pvr97klk8er8c4ca3qux94lj6rc766gf8zjsaf5mheqy8zshwe9ln

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Discussion

Stacker🥞 9mo ago

i prefer using my own node and waiting 5 seconds

Matt Corallo 9mo ago

You do that! But also using your own node shouldn’t mean you have to wait five seconds. Check out LDK’s pathfinder and use a published scoring file!

calle 9mo ago

Yep, I recommend doing so in the referenced post

Egge 9mo ago

He is talking about Zaps, not regular payments. So that includes

- Pathfinding done

- Payment settled

- Zap receipt published

- Zap receipt forwarded to all subscribers

Matt Corallo 9mo ago

Yes, I’m counting the first two but the last two are the same whether you use ecash or not - the payer has to go publish the event.

Justin Moon 9mo ago

I’m in Madeira right now and payments from Primal (ie Strike) almost never complete in 5 seconds. Maybe 1 in 10 so far.

Justin Moon 9mo ago

These payments are in-person to a merchant pos. Don’t know what pos they are using.

Matt Corallo 9mo ago

You should tell Strike this. That’s really embarrassingly slow!

calle 9mo ago

I make Lightning transactions literally every day and it's always been like that. Once in a blue moon they succeed < 5s. It happens, but it's definitely not the norm.

And we need to add the zap part (getting invoice via http, sender publishing zap request, receiver publishing zap receipt on nostr).

Matt Corallo 9mo ago

> I make Lightning transactions literally every day and it's always been like that. Once in a blue moon they succeed < 5s. It happens, but it's definitely not the norm.

Right, my point is you should complain to your lightning wallet because that’s embarrassing! We have the tech to fix this, it’s deployed in many places.

> And we need to add the zap part (getting invoice via http, sender publishing zap request, receiver publishing zap receipt on nostr).

Sure, but that’s one additional round trip to an HTTP server (max 200ms).

calle 9mo ago

Nah. For a zap to succeed you need a few more things than just a good routing algo. Not sure if you read my post or whether you just want to complain about the 5-10s number. I have a huge amount of data to back up my claims.

I've run several big LN services in the past and I've always measured the payment speeds. For months now I've been measuring speeds for payments across many Cashu mints. These are usually well-conntected nodes, better than the average for sure. The average for that is a pretty stable 4-5s. Some take 2s, others take 20s or 14 days. And that's *just* the LN part. For a zap you have multiple additional http and nostr steps for the payment to actually complete.

Matt Corallo 9mo ago

All I can tell you is your data doesn’t match mine. Maybe lnd just sucks, I dunno, but achieving reliable payments way under 5 seconds is incredibly doable with LN today!

calle 9mo ago

agree

tee 9mo ago

A thorough deep dive into lightning (hardware and software) would be really helpful. Little snippets scattered across the web are out of date, and it's hard to get a good picture of the network in terms of what it makes sense to do in terms of setting up a node or going custodial.