Author: Christian Decker 2017-11-23 12:50:44
Published on: 2017-11-23T12:50:44+00:00
In this email conversation, Pedro and Christian discuss the current implementation of onion-like packets used for payments in the Lightning Network (LN). While the current system requires the node to compute the entire route, they have mechanisms in place for the two endpoints of a route to collaboratively find such a route. This includes giving the sender hints on how best to reach the recipient, such as adding channel information in the invoice, and eventually adding landmarks. Pedro suggests an approach where each user in the LN locally stores the complete set of opened channels either by looking at open channel transactions in the blockchain or by a gossip protocol. However, Christian notes that this approach has trivial privacy issues and is not scalable for a growing number of users and channels between them. Additionally, if open channel transactions can be modified to be indistinguishable from other Bitcoin transactions, this approach would no longer be possible. Christian explains that the funding transactions are currently indistinguishable from any other P2SH transaction and that the gossip protocol does not require the information to be identifiable on-chain, only that they can verify some commitment to what they are claiming. He also expresses his desire to separate the base routing layer and the onion routing layer eventually, where the base layer would provide end-to-end connectivity between any two nodes and the onion layer would randomly choose nodes in the network and not be bound to the network's topology, similar to how IP and TOR are not mixed.
Updated on: 2023-05-24T03:11:49.378315+00:00