Author: Rusty Russell 2015-09-27 05:26:29
Published on: 2015-09-27T05:26:29+00:00
Anthony Towns and Rusty Russell had a discussion about beacon nodes on the Lightning Network mailing list. They talked about how the number of beacon nodes is determined by a log scale with network size and can be derived from previous beacons. There was debate about whether nodes should be able to choose their number of beacons. It was suggested that an immediate competition phase should follow the broadcast of a block where nodes compete via SPV proof of some transaction to become a beacon. The possibility of an attack on beacons was also discussed, as well as the idea of using nanopayments to probe a route for fee information. The conversation also included a discussion of the practicality of running a full node on a phone to make profits off routing. One person believed that running a full node on a phone will burn battery and up the latency for people routed through it. They also thought that forwarding introduces the risk that all funds are tied up in active HTLCs when you want to buy a coffee.The conversation also talked about how mesh networks were a much better description than hub-and-spoke and questioned whether phones are so insecure that having a private key that's reasonably convenient but safe while offline is impossible. The conversation also touched on privacy concerns and how deniability is important. Thus, the person would want their wallet to forward payments when offered. They also talked about the limit on the number of nodes that can effectively serve 100k users and suggestions about hosted wallets or relying on the network to work out a cheap route. Finally, the conversation ended by discussing routes propagate proportional to the number of beacons, which even with hundreds, is still cheap.
Updated on: 2023-05-23T20:25:32.100750+00:00