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28 sats \ 5 replies \ @siggy47 2 Oct \ parent \ on: “Toxic Lightning Maximalist” actually a thing? Looking for a definition... lightning
Maybe off topic a little here, but could you explain in a non techy accessible way your problems with Bolt12?
Summarily, it's terrible engineering that doesn't address real problems nor does it even work well at the things it pretends to solve.
- It uses "onion messages" to round trip invoices over Lightning Network peers, basically Tor, which if you've ever used Tor you know is too unreliable for real world payments
- This is because when you relay messages like this, every hop along the way becomes a point of failure... bolt12 increases failure probability
- In a network like lightning, these hops can be all over the globe, a request over bolt12 could circle the world multiple times... bolt12 adds latency
- Bolt12 aimed to liberate mobile nodes from trusted webservers as required by LNURL... in so doing Bolt12 attempts to normalize mobile nodes which are bad for Lightning and hurt adoption by demonstrating Lightning in the worst possible environment
- Bolt12 offers are static codes so you can receive ad-hoc payments, but this already existed in Lightning as LND has had static keysend for years
- Despite static offers being a purported use-case, it did so in the context of mobile nodes that can't be relied on for ad-hoc payments because they are default off-line
- Bolt12 claimed to enhance privacy, which was an outright lie and FUD against not using it, such privacy options exists outside of its context
- Bolt12 tries to normalize arbitrary data across a payments protocol, analogous to normalizing jpegs on Bitcoin
These may all seem obvious in hindsight, but I've been pointing these out long before it was ever shipped or ratified.
The push goes on despite vindication.
Given the attitude of developers that continue to push it, we can only conclude they're arrogant bozos or outright malicious.
Despite the lack of merit, there was a lot of hype around Bolt12, because it was astroturfed by NGO's, further bringing motives into question.
The most generous view is that was an envy-driven spec from the ground up, pushed by the minor Lightning implementations that are trying to gain share vs. LND.
The use-cases that the NGO's and minor implementations used to astroturf this have all been addressed by CLINK Offers, which obviates the trusted web-server, provides static codes for ad-hoc payments, is more performant, de-coupled from Lightning identity itself for enhanced privacy, and separates a number of concerns on the implementation level. It's only been published for weeks and has more traction than Bolt12 has achieved with years of manufactured hype. Oddly zero support from the NGO's for it however, textbook not invented here syndrome.
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There's actually not a DNS component to bolt12 (Matt later came up with a BIP that combines DNS with Bolt12... but it's not a particularly offensive one... I could easily PR CLINK Offers to it just to troll)
Detailed res:
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