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500 sats \ 3 replies \ @TonyGiorgio 8 Jan 2023 \ on: Is LND (Lightning Labs) ruining the Lighting Network? bitcoin
Careful what you wish for. As @benthecarman said in this thread, it's really miles beyond any other implementation. I don't like any of this as much as the next guy. But as a developer building custom lightning solutions for a living, it really fucking sucks to build on anything not LND unless you're so expert that you can manage LDK and build your own node implementation with it, but that's not a walk in the park either.
Running CLN is one thing if you can figure out (and really test your backups after reading the ~50 page document on backup procedures). Developing on it is a different story. I'm working on a project just using 6 or 7 API calls and none of that shit even works and the lack of support or care from the couple people that kind of work on it is frustrating enough to question "well then why would I even build on it". It'll cost millions of dollars for a serious project to switch to CLN. It's best at that point to hire experts to build your own impl on LDK at that point.
I don't want to hear about people's hobby projects building on hobby CLN, or someone that used CLN to open a few channels that barely do any routing. Try doing something serious. Ask ZFR how it ended up for him and if he even got his funds out of his channels correctly...
I guess the project I am working on (Clams) counts as a hobby project as it is not used at any real scale ATM, but I found that all of the CLN Rest API's are easy to use and are reliable.
I also have found that the CLN team are all super responsive on their discord and are very generous with their time when I needed help with anything.
I was previously building a project on LND and I think the docs are definitely better, and I had helpful and quick responses from their devs in their Slack as well.
So overall I would say that both implementations currently have a similar dev experience.
I chose to build on CLN as I think they are prioritising better features (Bolt 12, Liquidity Ads, Bookkeeper) and I would like them to have a greater share of the network. Having 90% of the network using one implementation is not good for the network as a whole IMO.
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Yeah I mean there's nothing wrong with the "hobby project" stuff and I think your project should be a good one to work on. It's just like - I'm tired of the argument of "oh I did a few things with CLN before and it's great, everyone should switch to it because F LND".
Projects which are mostly just meant to proxy calls to CLN itself, like yours, should probably have a decent experience. You're a window into the actual CLN API. And for people that simply want a node to be there and do a few things like pay and receive occasionally, it's not the worst thing in the world to use. But It's no question to why LND has and will probably continue to have majority nodes for quite some time further.
Building a business on top of CLN is just a way different story, maybe one that people don't care about, but if it's easy for a business to do, then it's easy for a normal person to as well, IMO. Needless to say, I don't have high hopes for their greenlight project either and I really wonder if Roy will question going that direction with Breez as time goes on. It's quite ironic since LND has ended up implementing many of the features that Breez has been waiting on for quite some time. Too little too late maybe, and the direction of LL is questionable, but pick your poison I guess.
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Yeah I agree it is not as simple as F LND. We are all Bitcoiners here at the end of the day, we are on the same team and we should strive for a collaborative rather than combative environment as we are fighting an uphill battle against the incumbents as it is.
Have you written down anywhere the pain points you ran in to when trying to build a business on CLN? I would personally be interested to understand what you mean and my sense is that the CLN team would value that feedback. Things that come to my mind for enterprise businesses would be the ability to run a cluster of nodes connected to the same DB for failover options, but I believe the Postgres backend looks like a good option there, but admittedly I have not tried that option before. Previously CLN seemed to be better in regards to DB size (reason for zero fee routing node to switch i believe) but my understanding is that LND has made improvements to catch up on this in recent releases. So yeah curious on particularly what you found a show stopper in CLN integration.
I like the idea of Greenlight and have high hopes for it. It is yet another way people can run nodes and I like that there are so many options with different tradeoffs that suit different situations. I am curious in the long run if there will be a power law distribution on how people run nodes. Will it mostly be full mobile nodes, will it be node in a box solutions, will it be cloud nodes or a combination that is reasonably distributed?
I look forward the Breez/Greenlight solution as it feels like a great set of tradeoffs for most average users, but let's see!
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