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Reading Man, Economy and State for the second time. Only like 500 more pages than human action it feels less poetic, if I can use that term.

Honestly from my perspective it always made more sense to me that lightning would have a more federated model. Small group of channels with the wealthiest member (or a pooled fund for outbound funds) connecting to each adjacent economic group. Then larger actors would connect adjacent towns, Then adjacent cities, and so on enveloping the world. Routing would nearly always go [Individual-Group-Town-State-State-Town-Group-Individual] for the longest hops. Maybe I just think to much like an econ guy and not enough in the practical limits of the code.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 1y ago

i tried to read ME&S but it felt like he was trying to just distill HA for dumb people, i think i got through about 1/4 of it before giving up

but yes, lightning is an open federated design, i can imagine building a redundancy protocol so that multiple providers could aggregate and fan out their infra to provide highly available big channel infra... it can already be done with plain simple network failover protocols that already exist, just a matter of tailoring one to do it with LN... the other thing it needs is a shared, highly consistent shared state data system so the multiple channels don't clobber each other's movements when a channel gets to the edge of capacity in one direction

see, that's the thing, i can see the network tech and the econ at the same time, really, it's just a matter of me finding someone with the money who is satisfied that i have the capacity to engineer it, and it would be my job for a decade to make this shit rock solid

but instead i'm here building a shitty middleware for a shitcoin gaming social platform, such is life

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Discussion

JackTheMimic 1y ago

Maybe channel states could work like counting cards? Max capacity, minus X% equals +1 get over 5-6 and you become an "Outbound preferred" channel? I dunno if that is possible I'm not a code guy buy channel mode preference might be smart.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 1y ago

that's along the kind of lines i'm thinking, the thing is currently the protocol has near zero propagation of anything about channel state, the best you could do with a node right now is for it to literally just pretend to be offline but then it can't rebalance, as i see it, it just has to say what direction it's better to send payments through it

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 1y ago

giving capacity info is probably a harder sell for the LN devs, but at least a sign of preferred direction would be great

JackTheMimic 1y ago

Yeah, that's why I thought percentage would be more apt. 30% spend capacity could mean 30k or 3mil but it would signal to the network that it prefers to receive while routing. Again, I'm not a dev but this feels too obvious to have not been thought of or at least considered.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 1y ago

yeah, i'm not sure why there isn't a simple binary directional bias info propagated in the p2p node data

they really do hide the capacity though, and it's really lame because routing payments REQUIRES some estimate of at least the direction to send them over a path

JackTheMimic 1y ago

Is this a feature that can be client side through LND or Core? Or would it have to be a whole BOLT iteration?

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 1y ago

no, it's a peer to peer network thing

lightning is based on Sphinx https://cypherpunks.ca/~iang/pubs/Sphinx_Oakland09.pdf

it uses a source-routed onion encryption layering scheme

https://github.com/indra-labs/indra was my attempt to turn that into a whole network transport protocol, i did that work from late 2022 to 2023

one of the things that i figured out during that research and development work i was doing was that in order to make this into a network transport, it needed a very fast converging, but decentralised mechanism for propagating network state... congestion is the biggest risk, nodes being offline is the obvious but congestion is the real danger, and this is exactly the same dynamic with Lightning

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 1y ago

people don't know what i'm doing, or where i come from, or what i do, it almost seems like i have the curse of Cassandra

JackTheMimic 1y ago

Most people are just surviving. It's tough to focus on very beneficial tech if the benefit isn't immediately tangible. Cypherpunks have a bias toward the privacy and anonymity value. Most people see that (incorrectly) as a shady want to hide malfeasance. As an anarchist, I understand your feeling completely. So many problems that if people listened to my distrust for the government, would have been avoided.