I am not sure how it came to be that I only hear people on social media talking about Bolt 12, and how AMP somehow isn't talked about very much, such that I never encountered a mention of it.
AMP provides both the common payee issued invoices as well as sender initiated payments in the case that the receiver has advertised their node public key.
AMP payments don't get stuck. They either go through, or they fail very quickly, and they can carry payments between two points so long as there is parallel paths that exceed the capacity required in sum.
I would appreciate it if someone would explain to me, why there is this idea you encounter in a lot of places that advertising your node's public key is supposedly a security risk.
The reason why I dispute this is because anyone can run a node and find this out, as well as the channels and channel sizes of the node. Aside from the channels that are not advertised, private channels.
Lightning wouldn't work at all if the p2p network wasn't gossiping these keys to everyone.
What kind of attacker doesn't know this???
It is possible to even not advertise your LN node at all, run private channels to nodes that are otherwise public channel connected, and issue invoices that contain routing hints to get back to your node.
I would suggest that if someone wants to really protect the security of their LN they run all their channels this way and issue invoices from an IP address that is not the same as the LN node, via proxy/VPN connections between the app server and the LN node.
In this way, only the node selected as the last hop that goes across the private channel to you reveals key and IP address, something buried deep under layers of onion encryption.
The thing that prompted me to make this post was this: Why is everyone talking about Bolt 12 and nobody seems to know about AMP? I already covered the false security of not allowing keysend/AMP payments above.
Are the majority of plebs really that clueless they have zero concept of threat models and attack surfaces in p2p networks? Seems like a deficiency that someone should be addressing. Saying a public p2p node identity key is a security risk to give to humans is just ridiculous. Security by obscurity is not secure to anyone motivated to poke around.
Besides this, the lack of general awareness of sender side initiated payments seems to me like you all are missing out on half of the utility of LN. Streaming payments. Recurring payments. Subscriptions.
We here at Indra are going to be using sender initiated AMPs as it's the only way for clients to spontaneously and anonymously pay relays for traffic sessions, and the beautiful thing is that it's so fast that it can be automated and in the same time as a Tor node opens channels - every time - Indra will be able to acquire enough sessions with relays that you never wait again.
I have a bit of a habit of seeing some technology and thinking of a way to use it that nobody else has, and for me it's the most natural use case but somehow thousands of people don't see it. And then almost always, not long after I start talking about it, everyone learns about it and then it finally starts to become normal.
I dunno about you but the number of business opportunities that involve recurring, fast, small payments are myriad. They allow accountless usage of services, you simply pay, and then reveal the preimage and they deliver.