On the scalability issues of onboarding millions of LN mobile clients

Summary:

Igor Cota suggests exploring the feasibility of running full nodes on everyday phones, as an alternative to relying on a few thousand full-node operators being nice and servicing friendly millions of Lightning Network (LN) mobile clients. He proposes the deployment of part-time or Sleeper Nodes™ that would only carry a subset of the blockchain and work while their operator is asleep. They could also be user-friendly with Assume UTXO, which allows them to be bootstrapped quickly. Cota believes this is a huge untapped resource that would allow mobile nodes to earn their keep. By plugging in our phones and going to sleep, we could blanket the whole world in (somewhat) full nodes. Antoine Riard discusses the ongoing advancement of BIP 157 implementation in Core, which may reflect on the future of light client protocols and make better-informed decisions about what kind of infrastructure is needed to support mobile clients at large scale. He notes that trust-minimization of Bitcoin security model has always relied first and above on running a full-node. This current paradigm may be shifted by LN, where fast, affordable, confidential, censorship-resistant payment services may attract a lot of adoption without users running a full-node.Riard discusses the challenges of designing a mobile-first LN experience, especially in terms of security and privacy. He believes that the problem can be scoped as how to build a scalable, secure, private chain access backend for millions of LN clients. Light client protocols for LN exist, although their privacy and security guarantees with regards to implementation on the client-side may still be an object of concern. One of the bottlenecks is likely the number of full-nodes being willing to dedicate resources to serve those clients. Assuming 10M light clients each of them consuming ~100MB/month for filters/headers, that means you're asking 1PB/month of traffic to the backbone network. Even with cheaper, more efficient protocols like BIP 157, Riard notes that you may have a huge discrepancy between what is asked and what is offered. He believes that monetary compensation should be introduced in exchange for servicing filters. Light client not dedicating resources to maintain the network but free-riding on it, you may use their micro-payment capabilities to price chain access resources. Riard thinks that this proposition may suit within the watchtower paradigm, where another entity is delegated some part of protocol execution, alleviating client onliness requirement.

Updated on: 2023-06-14T01:14:58.117384+00:00