Author: Louis Willcock 2017-11-03 22:18:23
Published on: 2017-11-03T22:18:23+00:00
In a Lightning-dev mailing list, Rusty Russell answered some questions about the Lightning Network's (LN) payment protocol. One of the questions was about handling payments from users who may or may not use LN. Russell said that one way to handle it is by using a BOLT 11 QR code which can contain a fallback address. But this still requires their app to understand BOLT11 enough to extract it. If they understand the BIP70 payment protocol, it could include an alternate payment mechanism, but it seems nobody actually uses this. Another question was about payment delays due to someone in the middle not cooperating fast enough. Russell said that if the payment has failed, you can either wait or try again with a new invoice. For version 1.1, users would be able to reuse the same invoice safely, as long as the merchant was honest if it received two payments and rejects the second. If it hasn't failed yet, you'll get your goods and don't care that you have to wait for the money to be deducted. Russell also discussed the decremental time lock which is strongly related to block confirmation time. He said that even if there was a currency with very fast confirmation times (like 5 seconds), the time lock period could not be too short because you still need a margin to turn around payments. In practice, if payments are so unreliable that you have to worry about this case, then something's horribly wrong!
Updated on: 2023-05-24T02:42:56.274583+00:00