<p>You are confusing two things here: payment channels and network communication. A payment channel is really the set of commitment transactions and their revocations. It is unrelated to network communications and the participants in a payment channel do not need to communicate via one specific way.</p>

<p>The network communications that nodes use to talk to each other (e.g. to update payment channel states) use TCP in a P2P manner. Like Bitcoin, a node establishes a TCP connection to other nodes, and those nodes have connections to other nodes. P2P is not a communication standard like TCP and UDP, rather it is a model of the network's structure and is a concept.</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-11-20T15:13:17.380Z
2018-11-20T15:13:17.380Z
Ava Chow
<p>I read the following article and watched below video.</p>

<p><a href="https://medium.com/@melik_87377/lightning-network-enables-unicast-transactions-in-bitcoin-lightning-is-bitcoins-tcp-ip-stack-8ec1d42c14f5" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://medium.com/@melik_87377/lightning-network-enables-unicast-transactions-in-bitcoin-lightning-is-bitcoins-tcp-ip-stack-8ec1d42c14f5</a></p>

<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug8NH67_EfE" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug8NH67_EfE</a></p>

<p>On those media, they say that payment channels are based on just TCP/IP connection (unicast) not p2p.</p>

<p>In Lightning network's white paper, there is no explanation of what method is used to establish payment channel between two nodes.</p>

<p>What method is used for establishing payment channels ? traditional TCP/IP way or p2p ?</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-11-20T05:14:25.293Z
Why would p2p not be TCP/IP?
Pieter Wuille
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-11-20T05:16:01.923Z
umm. my question can be ambiguous. I meant that two nodes are connected as TCP connection ?
xiaofo
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-11-20T05:25:54.403Z
You're asking "TCP/IP or p2p". A peer-to-peer network means that nodes are connected to each other as opposed to a client/server architecture. The connections between peers are generally TCP/IP still - so you're asking about the same thing twice.
Pieter Wuille
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-11-20T06:03:40.723Z
Related: [How is bitcoin transactions and the blockchain as a whole transferred over the internet?](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/67335/how-is-bitcoin-transactions-and-the-blockchain-as-a-whole-transferred-over-the-i)
Mason Ticehurst
<lightning-network><scalability><off-chain>
How do nodes communicate over Lightning network?
xiaofo
# How do nodes communicate over Lightning network?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2018-11-20)

I read the following article and watched below video.

<https://medium.com/@melik_87377/lightning-network-enables-unicast-transactions-in-bitcoin-lightning-is-bitcoins-tcp-ip-stack-8ec1d42c14f5>

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug8NH67_EfE>

On those media, they say that payment channels are based on just TCP/IP connection (unicast) not p2p.

In Lightning network's white paper, there is no explanation of what method is used to establish payment channel between two nodes.

What method is used for establishing payment channels ? traditional TCP/IP way or p2p ?

**Tags:** lightning-network, scalability, off-chain

> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: Why would p2p not be TCP/IP?  
> **username_0**: umm. my question can be ambiguous. I meant that two nodes are connected as TCP connection ?  
> **username_1**: You're asking "TCP/IP or p2p". A peer-to-peer network means that nodes are connected to each other as opposed to a client/server architecture. The connections between peers are generally TCP/IP still - so you're asking about the same thing twice.  
> **username_2**: Related: [How is bitcoin transactions and the blockchain as a whole transferred over the internet?](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/67335/how-is-bitcoin-transactions-and-the-blockchain-as-a-whole-transferred-over-the-i)  

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## 1 answers

### Answer by username_3 on 2018-11-20. Score: 1 | Accepted answer

You are confusing two things here: payment channels and network communication. A payment channel is really the set of commitment transactions and their revocations. It is unrelated to network communications and the participants in a payment channel do not need to communicate via one specific way.

The network communications that nodes use to talk to each other (e.g. to update payment channel states) use TCP in a P2P manner. Like Bitcoin, a node establishes a TCP connection to other nodes, and those nodes have connections to other nodes. P2P is not a communication standard like TCP and UDP, rather it is a model of the network's structure and is a concept.


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