[tmcls]

[Member of the statechannels.org team here.]

Not directly. State channels are similar to lightning, but there's a key difference:

* in lightning each payment is routed through the network independently, requiring participation from the intermediary nodes

* in a state channel the intermediary nodes are used to establish a channel and then the payments are direct

The upshot is that in state channels, once the connection is established, the payments are truly peer-to-peer, and don't need any interaction with a third party.

We use this property in Web3Torrent, as the payments are sent directly peer-to-peer on top of the webtorrent messaging layer. This wouldn't be possible with lightning, though you could probably find another way to accomplish something similar.

[homakov]

What happened to traditional definition of state channels?

It used to be just like payment channels, but with a bigger scope and more fancy state operations.

The trick with avoiding multiparties was called "virtual state channels" or something like that. When did it change?

[tphyahoo2]

I will try to assume good faith here, and just state facts.

Lightning channels are 2 end points, p2p.

Lightning routes are a sequence of lightning channels. Routes are also 2 end points, also p2p. No trusted is required for intermediaries.

Every internet packet, unless it is you to your lan router, passes through many intermediaries. I have no idea how ethereum state channels work, but I assume they route using tcp/ip, and statechannel team understands this as p2p.

So anyway, lightning is p2p.

Cheers.

https://standardcrypto.wordpress.com/2020/04/30/a16z-struggl...