Author: CJP 2018-11-04 19:49:37
Published on: 2018-11-04T19:49:37+00:00
In an email exchange on November 4th, 2018, CJP raised concerns about a scenario where some powerful participant enforces Know Your Customer (KYC) requirements on Lightning nodes. This participant would require its direct neighbors to reveal their identity or face channel closure, and then ask its direct neighbors to reveal the identity of their direct neighbors, with the threat of more extreme penalties if they don't comply. ZmnSCPxj disagreed with this scenario and suggested that the rest of the network should punish this participant by closing any channel to it, which would greatly lower its fee earnings and ability to monitor or control the network.ZmnSCPxj also believed that a feature allowing payees to not maintain even a pseudonym on the Lightning Network would be desirable. However, CJP argued that for most use cases a payee pseudonym is needed, unless the use case is donating to random strangers or if the thing being paid for is cryptographically linked to the Lightning payment. In such cases, a truly anonymous payee makes sense.They discussed rendezvous routing as a way to decouple the pseudonym from a location in the Lightning network. The destination would choose the nodes on its half of the route and thus pay for fees, while the source would only be required to deliver the specified amount to the first hop node of the destination half of the rendezvous route.
Updated on: 2023-05-25T15:11:06.756895+00:00