Author: Pierre 2017-05-02 16:11:29
Published on: 2017-05-02T16:11:29+00:00
The Lightning Development mailing list is discussing the proposal to replace chanID with compressed serialized public key. The concern is that users are not able to verify the signature without an external mapping, which makes optimizing for size a bit of a waste. Although using the short chanID in the onion was proposed, it was rejected because announcements take time to propagate through the network and we won't always have a full view of the network in the future. The payment requests are sent out-of-band, so optimizing their size may not be as important as messages exchanged on the p2p network. Key recovery from the signature allows for information to be present on the validity of the signature and thereby authenticity of the payreq and integrity of the contents. The chanid is considered only a courtesy from this point of view. Rusty Russell thinks that while the bech32 checksum may not be significant, the code reuse outweighs other arguments since codebases will already have bech32 anyway. However, the length of payreqs means there is little use for bech32 character that has been optimized for manual-entry.
Updated on: 2023-05-24T01:11:57.543964+00:00