Author: Rusty Russell 2016-04-04 02:19:32
Published on: 2016-04-04T02:19:32+00:00
In this email exchange, Anton expresses his interest in adding Lightning Network (LN) to his Bitcoin wallet and asks about how it can work for end-users. Rusty explains that in order to interact with LN, a payment sender needs the R-hash and one or more routes. Nodes have an ID that is a bitcoin-style pubkey, and they publish their public routes by proving they own the anchor transactions for their channels. Every 24 hours a new set of landmarks are selected using the bitcoin block hash, and every node keeps information on routes to and from the landmarks. To accept a payment, the receiver must provide a unique hash of R-value, an amount, and route information from a landmark to themselves. The receiving node doesn't know where the sending node is. Anton also mentions further requirements, such as the need for "core" data to come directly from the receiver's device and resistance to MITM and identity theft. Rusty suggests that users should be able to generate stable identities on their devices using EC25519 keys because of their small size and applicability for both encryption and signing. Rusty also explains that there needs to be a service parallel to LN that can transfer "core" data in encrypted form while optionally acting as a third-party watcher for broadcasted commitment transactions and a "name authority" for users who supplied metadata along with their public keys. Rusty notes that offline receive is much harder and he does not plan on supporting it in a 1.0 spec.
Updated on: 2023-05-23T23:14:50.562938+00:00