I wonder why LDK wallets are kind of abandoned. I saw some of them that are 3 years not updated.
The only one that see maintained well is Alby Hub.
Another working one is BitKit.
Do you know more of them? Working and maintained not abandoned.
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Never heard of lexe
cashapp and fedimint are out of discussion.
Lexe I know about them, yes worth mention it.
Why?
Beware alt-implementations of Lightning nodes (bad), its far riskier than alt-implementations of Bitcoin itself (good)
#1317912
Are you saying LDK is the issue?
I'm saying that the FUD that often comes up when discussing alternative implementations of Bitcoin re: Core's monopoly are backwards.
Alt-implementations on L2 are dangerous due to it's highly coordinated nature and the cascading effect, that's not the case on L1.
By operating any minor lightning implementation, not just LDK as there at least 2 others, you face undue operational risk vs sticking with the prevailing implementation.
True, building on top of the giants shoulders is always safer. But in this case how from your perspective, smaller implementations like LDK can thrive?
In that thread I get into the incentives of Lightning implementations being different than on L1, I see no escape from this at present.
Every Lightning implementation serves its creators as distribution or scaffolding for other services, which isn't the case with alt-L1 implementations.
So these aren't keeping consensus monoculture in-check like an L1 imp would, nor are they strictly being used as libraries to enable purpose-driven shells.
This delivery of ancillary services is a mal-incentive, as we've seen with hostile specs like Bolt12, where the minor and largely irrelevant implementations must dilute the protocol with trash in effort to gain share.
What a minor implementation needs to do to thrive is be purpose driven, "in Rust" is not purpose, bundling an LSP is not purpose, experimental new features should be a fork of the prevailing implementation, and challenging monoculture should be an LND-derived library. None of the minors have a clear stand-alone purpose.
If I had unlimited resources to shepherd an alt, it's purpose would be to decouple implementation from services. That would be a fork of LND that strips it down the essentials, making it both compatible with the network, and more flexible for ancillary services to build on. Once that kernel of sorts is functional, only then would I port to other languages with the sole emphasis being compatibility with what's prevailing regardless of the specs.
LDK does at least pays lip-service to this library model, which is good, but it's scope beyond that makes it ineffective at doing so. Complete re-imp in Rust is a disaster, and so they still try to influence LND to make their shit work. The NGO behind it is hostile, and the services they build on top of it are the ultimately dictate of roadmap. They're not simply making a better or more versatile implementation.