Published on: 2018-03-21T05:50:43+00:00
In a discussion on the Lightning-dev mailing list, member Corné Plooy introduced an idea for using Lightning for various types of payments. The proposal suggests having a direct line of communication between payer and payee instead of BOLT11-style interaction, which he believes would make Lightning more convenient for use cases such as salary payments or direct pay-out of cryptocurrency bought on an exchange. Plooy has registered the proposal under BOLT #12 and provided a detailed outline in a GitHub repository.Andy Schroder raised several questions in response to Plooy's proposal. Firstly, Schroder questioned the necessity of a two-step process for the payee's URL when requesting invoices. Secondly, he suggested providing multiple routes in case the capacity of the partial onion route is insufficient. Thirdly, Schroder queried how partial refunds would be handled in the proposed protocol. Finally, Schroder asked how the payer would identify themselves to the payee and specify their desired goods or services for invoicing.ZmnSCPxj responded to the discussion by mentioning the Web Payments Working Group of W3C, which aims to make Bitcoin payments payable over Web payment protocols. Christian Decker of Blockstream is a member of this group and can provide valuable insights into various payment use cases and their subtleties. While the Web Payments Working Group's concept is still focused on non-recurring purchases, they aim to achieve a generalized "payment instruction" capable of expressing subscriptions, preauthorizations, refunds, and other payment-related instructions.Plooy also clarified the use case of the URL, explaining that it contains an optional invoice ID. A payee can share the same URL with one or more payers for performing payments. He further mentioned the possibility of simplifying BOLT 12 by removing refunds, but emphasized the need to revisit this decision later with proper features added. Plooy requested suggestions for working out the details of BOLT 12 and how to have it incorporated into lightningnetwork/lightning-rfc.Overall, the proposal by Corné Plooy aims to improve Lightning for various payment scenarios. While it is still a work in progress, the author encourages feedback and collaboration on the idea.
Updated on: 2023-07-31T19:50:50.243549+00:00