Author: Antoine Riard 2022-12-02 23:25:16
Published on: 2022-12-02T23:25:16+00:00
In a recent exchange on the Lightning-dev mailing list, Antoine raised his support for the gradual generalization of Lightning onion messaging as a transport network for Bitcoin-specific traffic. He mentioned that this could include offers, offline receive control flow or credentials tokens, and even in the future, DLC offers. However, he expressed concerns about the extension being used as a fully-fledged anonymity network like Tor or I2P, which could lead to issues with DoS. Antoine also suggested looking into the recent fat errors proposal as a mechanism to improve the reliability of path-finding, which would be a needed piece for reputational credentials. In response to Antoine's comments, Loki Verloren shared his thoughts on the topic and announced that he was working on a project to build an independent, Lightning-funded onion routing relay network. The project would initially support LND/BTCD/Neutrino and would offer key innovations such as a mechanism for path tracing and reputation ranking of nodes based on their recent and reliable performance. Channels running across this overlay network would not be possible to jam, and payment schemes might work as a full solution against attempts to jam channels. Loki's current idea for reputation involves creating a loose consensus on the network of which nodes are better connected and dependable. Using a median/zip merging process for evaluating the nodes makes it hard for an adversary to damage the reputation of good nodes without also having to run a lot of nodes and develop a good reputation. Overall, the discussion focused on the potential benefits and challenges of using Lightning onion messaging as a transport network and the need for reliable and secure path-finding mechanisms.
Updated on: 2023-06-03T10:54:53.314607+00:00