Author: Corné Plooy 2018-04-05 15:52:27
Published on: 2018-04-05T15:52:27+00:00
A Lightning developer named Igor Cota has been experimenting with payments via NFC (near-field communication) and has set up an instance of c-lightning on Android. He envisions a system that is instantaneous like contactless bank cards, encodes a fancy HTML receipt in bolt11 for future reference and avoids the need for QR codes. Passive tags work as expected if both the phone and terminal are connected to the network and have a route to each other. Card emulation mode is more interesting as it enables two-way communication and therefore an ad hoc connection to the Lightning network. After some handshaking, the phone can tell the terminal that it wants to connect to Lightning via NFC. All communication between the two Lightning nodes can be done over NFC or even Bluetooth, which might be useful as a fallback when mobile data is not available. ZmnSCPxj, another Lightning developer, responded to Igor's post with some concerns. In particular, he wondered why there needed to be a direct channel between payer and payee when the Lightning Network was designed to avoid needing direct channels. ZmnSCPxj also pointed out that the payer would need to get blockchain information from the payee if the payer itself had no internet access. The payee may have an incentive to prevent the payer from knowing that timeouts have been reached, for example, and may withhold new blocks. However, all censorship attacks that could be used on LN target the payee rather than the payer. If there are censorship concerns, one possible solution is to opt for a set-up where the payer has an authenticated connection to a trusted server through the Internet connection provided by the payee. The trusted server could be a full Lightning node running at the payer's home. The payer would only have to take a very light piece of electronics with them; it would still be larger than a credit card since authentication should be done payer-side (e.g., with a PIN code), but it could be smaller than a smartphone. Igor personally prefers this kind of set-up because he sees cell phones as a huge privacy issue; users are continuously transmitting their rough location to the network.
Updated on: 2023-05-24T22:45:24.087022+00:00