Author: Olaoluwa Osuntokun 2022-06-08 02:38:39
Published on: 2022-06-08T02:38:39+00:00
Recently, a Lightning Network (LN) Dev Summit was held in Oakland, California. The summit aimed to discuss the current state and evolution of the protocol. Compared to the last LN Dev Summit held in Zurich, Switzerland, this year had much better representation for all the major Lightning Node implementations. The notes taken during the summit attempted to capture the relevant discussions, decisions, and new research or follow-up areas.One of the main topics discussed at the summit was Taproot updates. Taproot had been a major topic of discussion at the previous summit as the soft fork had been deployed, but everyone was still monitoring its activation progress. Several months later, Taproot has now been fully activated, and the ecosystem is progressively deploying more advanced systems/applications that take advantage of the new features. The Simple Taproot Channels proposal came out of the last LN Dev summit and proposed an iterative roadmap that would progressively revamp the system to use more taprooty features instead of a "big bang" approach.During the summit, attendees also discussed applying Mini Sketch to LN Protocol to give nodes a more bandwidth-efficient way to sync channel updates and achieve better update propagation. Additionally, attendees evaluated proposed solutions on several axes including punishment/monetary, local vs global reputation, feasibility of mechanism design, UX implications, and implementation complexity regarding channel jamming solutions. A new proposal was not presented, but future work is expected to be done to parametrize solutions effectively.Furthermore, Blinded Paths was a relatively new proposal that was discussed during the summit to solve the last-mile privacy issue when receiving payments on LN. It replaces hop hints with a cryptographically blinded path so that the sender can use them for path finding, but doesn't actually know exactly which nodes they are. However, the size of the resulting invoice is an issue when using blinded paths for normal payments as receivers want to stuff as many of them as possible into the invoice.The Lightning Development mailing list discussed the importance of invoice fetching in light of blinded paths, which limit the amount of data that can be encoded in traditional QR codes. LN-URL and BOLT 12 are two standardized methods for fetching invoices, with the former using the existing BOLT 11 invoice format and an HTTP-based protocol, while the latter includes a new invoice format and allows for fetching via onion messages over the network.During the Lightning Network meeting, several other topics were discussed, such as friend-of-a-friend balance sharing and probing, trampoline routing, node fee optimization, and splicing. Friend-of-a-friend balance sharing and probing can provide senders with more information to choose a more reliable path, but this means nodes will be giving away more information that can potentially be used to ascertain payment flows. Trampoline routing is promising when combined with holding HTLCs at an origin node, allowing a mobile node to send a payment and then go offline.Finally, node fee optimization and fee rate cards were proposed as a way for routing nodes to encourage/discourage traffic. Splicing was also discussed, which hasn't been fully implemented and rolled out yet. Concurrent splices were debated, and it was noted that wallet and implementations will likely want to show the most pessimistic value. Overall, there were many interesting developments discussed during the meeting, and further research is needed to better guide implementations and wallets with respect to best practices.
Updated on: 2023-06-03T09:00:17.028967+00:00