Yours founder: Without SegVerification, Lightning Network is worthless

Yours is a social media app that allows readers to reward posters with Bitcoin payments. The project was founded by Ryan X. Charles, a former cryptocurrency engineer at Reddit. He recently shared the development of Yours with Alex Sterk on the Blocktalk show.

What sets Yours apart from other Bitcoin social media platforms like Changetip and Zapchain is that it offers a fully decentralized payment system designed to ensure that users have full control over their funds (including their Bitcoin private keys).

Initial release of Yours payment system

Yours’ goal has always been to use Bitcoin for its original purpose (digital cash). Charles said on the show:

In my opinion, if a platform wants to achieve complete centralization, then the US dollar is the best choice, because if you deploy payment systems such as Stripe, the use of US dollars becomes very convenient.

The initial version of the Yours platform used typical on-chain transactions, which meant the system was fully decentralized, but transaction fees were high and became a major issue in the payment process.

The problem at the time was that the Bitcoin transaction fee had reached 5 cents, and that was in April. 5 cents was too expensive, because the average amount a user paid was only about 5 cents. If the fee was the same as the amount sent, then the fee would be too high.

Therefore, Yours is clear that it can only continue to operate if it finds a way to replace this on-chain transaction model.

Yours deploys payment channel center

After reviewing the Lightning Network whitepaper and other papers on Bitcoin micropayments, Yours developed a new solution for a specific need. Their micropayment implementation is similar to the Lightning Network, but not identical.

Charles explained:

Smart contracts and lightning networks have only one big node. That is to say, there is a payment channel center in both systems, and each user has a corresponding payment channel connected to the center.

Charles said he doesn’t like to use the word “hub” to describe Yours’ micropayment solution because their solution is not centralized. Yours’ micropayment hub is completely trustless and does not hold anyone’s funds.

Rather than just routing payments between users, it’s more like a lightning network with only one node.

Over the past six months, everyone in the Yours team has been working hard on this micropayment solution. Charles said that from the perspective of system security and scalability, their work is not yet finished.

All I can say is that the basic elements of deploying this solution have been completed.

The Importance of Segregated Witness

Charles said that the Segregated Witness (SegWit) improvement added in Bitcoin Core 0.13.1 (not yet activated) will make systems like the Lightning Network more perfect.

Segregated verification is a necessary condition for the deployment of the Lightning Network. From a technical perspective, without segregated verification, the Lightning Network will lose its due value.

The payment channel used by Yours is one-way, that is, sending a micropayment requires two payment channels to work together. Therefore, it is easy to cause transaction malleability. Segregated verification happens to solve this problem, which means that the Yours network can initiate two-way payments under the premise of successful activation of segregated verification.

Charles said:

It feels terrible that the payment channels in our system are not bidirectional. I believe there is no other way to ensure the security of Yours network than to deploy segwit.

Yours plans to deploy the network architecture immediately after the activation of the isolated verification. If the solution cannot be activated on time, Charles has another plan:

First, we will evaluate the security status of the product. If the security issue is not serious, we will still release the product on schedule and wait for quarantine verification to be activated. Otherwise, we will take other measures to fix the security issue first.

Charles said that in a micropayment platform with minimal security, whitelisting users or systems for paid use is an effective way to prevent attacks.

It would be great if Segwit could be released on time so we don’t have to worry about these security issues.