Explain like it’s Friday:
What’s an LSAT?
Be warned, my current understanding of LSATs is sophomoric. In simile, it's like buying a digital ticket to a website with lightning and then gaining access to the website with the digital ticket. From https://lsat.tech/introduction:
LSAT stands for Lightning Service Authentication Token. LSATs are a new standard protocol for authentication and paid APIs developed by Lightning Labs. LSATs can serve both as authentication, as well as a payment mechanism (one can view it as a ticket) for paid APIs.
The beauty of them is that they are theoretically more straight forward at a UX level while enhancing privacy for the user and making backends more stateless (i.e. backends don't need to build a ticketing system from scratch and store a database of tickets, etc.). If you have an LSAT enabled client this whole system as a user becomes one click to pay (and possibly enter a recurring or regular payment agreement), then with your client continually access the resources you paid for - without ever logging in, entering credit card secrets, etc.
If there were a great LSAT browser plugin, for instance, SN could easily avoid being a custodian of user's funds by users permitting me via an LSAT token to charge you 1 sat when you post/comment/upvote. Users wouldn't even need accounts in a traditional sense - you would authenticate yourself with this LSAT token. Although, I'm not sure if LSATs are bidirectional in their current design - so users might still accumulate a balance on the site.
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