Creator of Litecoin Charlie Lee: "Payments in Bitcoin and Litecoin on the net are not peer-to-peer"

While on board the recent Coinsbank Blockchain Cruise, hosted from September 7-11, 2018 on the Mediterranean Sea, litecoin creator (LTC) Charlie Lee sat down and had a heated discussion with bitcoin cash (BCH) advocate Roger Ver.

During their speech, Ver boldly argued that bitcoin can no longer be used as peer-to-peer (P2P) digital money. Charlie responded by stating that the bitcoin is not actually a peer-to-peer.

Roger seemed shocked by Charlie's statement. Bitcoin is often described as "a peer-to-peer electronic payment system", the title of the Bitcoin whitepaper created by its pseudonym creator Satoshi Nakamoto.

To support his claim, Charlie explained that chain transactions are not actually peer-to-pee because, instead, "payments are sent from the sender to the miners, who register it on a distributed ledger".

He argued that while the network is P2P, payments "in the strict sense" are not how the sender can ignore the network and "directly communicate the transaction to the miners to send payments", which for Lee is a good thing since the receiver does not must be online to receive the funds.

3 / This is actually a good thing as the recipient does not have to be online to receive payments. Ironically, chain payments are more like a hub and spoke model where data mining pools are hubs, and users simply need to connect to those hubs to send payments.

– Charlie Lee [LTC⚡] (@SatoshiLite) 6 October 2018

From there, he illustrates how Lightning Network (LN) transactions are actually more peer-to-peer than chain transactions, because there are no intermediaries, transactions are truly maintained between users.

Although transactions can be routed through multiple nodes, LN transactions are created by the sender and receiver in peer-to-peer mode. To expand his claims, Charlie went on Twitter to further explain. Charlie's tweets can be read Here. In the end, he concluded that LN payments are the true vision of Satoshi.

6/6 Bitcoin with Lightning Network fits more closely with the title of the Bitcoin white paper: "A peer-to-peer electronic payment system". This is Satoshi's vision.

– Charlie Lee [LTC⚡] (@SatoshiLite) 6 October 2018

The first part of the debate between Roger and Charlie can be watched on YouTube.

Lighting a lightning

Many in the cryptocurrency space, especially Roger Ver, do not believe in the future of the Lightning network. They argue that it is inefficient, that it is possible to censor the transactions and may even be liable to money transmission laws.

During the discussion, Charlie clarifies the air regarding the lightning network, and helps shed light on why he believes he will succeed. Despite the launch at the start of this year, the use of Lightning is still extremely limited. Portfolios and software are still under development and are not yet easy to use.

However, Lightning's progress is fast approaching. Since the SegWit was launched a year ago, the Lightning team has worked hard to build the infrastructure needed for this second-tier solution.