bLIPs: A proposal for community-driven app layer and protocol extension standardization

Summary:

In a recent discussion on the Lightning-dev mailing list, Ryan Gentry proposed the idea of introducing a Bitcoin Lightning Improvement Proposal (bLIP) process that would allow for app layer best practices to be described and organized. This would not affect the existing BOLT (Basis of Lightning Technology) process but rather add a place for coordination and succinct description of features that are being built outside of the BOLT process today. While there are already some new BOLTs being offered, such as BOLT 12 and BOLT 14, there may still be barriers to participate in the BOLTs and contribute new ideas. Gentry suggests that a bLIP process would bring these new ideas into the fold and avoid leaving them buried in old ML posts or not documented at all. Some potential bLIP ideas that people have mentioned include each lnurl variant, on-the-fly channel opens, AMP, dynamic commitments, podcast payment metadata, p2p messaging formats, new pathfinding heuristics, remote node connection standards, etc. There was some previous discussion around this idea in 2018, where Rene Pickhardt proposed a similar idea called LIP. However, Roasbeef argued that we already have the equivalent of improvement proposals in the form of BOLTs and that historically new standardization documents are proposed initially as issues or pull requests when ultimately accepted. Roasbeef questions the need for another repository and suggests that all points addressed in Ryan's mail could very well be formalized into BOLTs. While Rene agrees that all the points addressed in Ryan's mail could be formalized into BOLTs, he suggests that maybe the current process of the BOLTs needs to be rethought to make it more accessible for new ideas to find their way into the BOLTs. He also notes that it would certainly help if the BOLTs were referenced on lightning.network web page and in the whitepaper as the place to go if one wants to learn about the Lightning Network.

Updated on: 2023-06-03T04:36:18.511576+00:00