Author: Ryan Gentry 2021-06-30 15:09:24
Published on: 2021-06-30T15:09:24+00:00
Ryan Gentry, a member of the Lightning Network community, has proposed the creation of a new process called bLIPs (Bitcoin Lightning Improvement Proposals) to supplement the existing BOLT (Basis of Lightning Technology) process. The goal of this new process is to provide a space for emerging best practices on the app layer to be described and organized, especially those that require coordination among multiple groups. Some potential bLIP ideas that were mentioned include lnurl variants, on-the-fly channel opens, AMP, dynamic commitments, podcast payment metadata, p2p messaging formats, new pathfinding heuristics, remote node connection standards, and more. Ryan believes that these features are being built outside of the BOLT process today, so ideally, a bLIP process would bring them into the fold instead of leaving them buried in old ML posts or not documented at all.In response to this proposal, Rene Pickhardt, another member of the Lightning Network community, expressed his concerns about creating a new repo and reducing the accessibility of new ideas to find their way into the BOLTs. However, he agreed that all the points addressed in Ryan's mail could very well be formalized into BOLTs. He also suggested that the BOLTs should be referenced on lightning.network web page and in the whitepaper as the place to be if one wants to learn about the Lightning Network. One of the main differences between 2018 and now is the scale of the Lightning Network development ecosystem. In 2018, the LN dev ecosystem was mostly ACINQ, Blockstream, and Lightning Labs, and the minimalist BOLTs process worked well. However, at this point, the broader ecosystem is significantly bigger than those three teams combined and it seems that the process should adjust to reflect the new environment. Ryan also gave an example of how a "best practice," such as LNURL, has been widely adopted yet not officially supported, and proposed that a bLIP process could provide a home for such emerging best practices. The linked lightning-rfc branch simply adds a new bLIPs folder in the existing repo (like René suggested as an option in 2018). Overall, the proposal of creating a bLIP process has received positive feedback from both app layer and protocol developers, and Ryan has started a branch describing such a process based on BIP-0002. If the community is interested in moving forward, he is looking for developers from various implementations and from the broader app layer ecosystem to volunteer to be listed as editors.
Updated on: 2023-06-03T04:37:00.626297+00:00