Thanks for all of your work in Bitcoin and Lightning and taking time for an AMA. Throughout all of your research and work in this space, and assuming Bitcoin continues its adoption trends... is there any reason you believe Lightning will not be the future payments layer of the world? Or any reason Lightning will fail/not become adopted/etc?
Sometimes I really worry about the attack vectors on Lightning, but more about the potential solutions than the attacks themselves sometimes. For instance like Channel Jamming mitigations, but there's others too. Potential ideas like reputation based routing, prepayments, and trusted debt-based solutions really worry me if we were to go down that route. To be honest, I don't think any protocol dev is in love with any of them. On one hand, we have not felt the pain yet and so it has not been prioritized, so I hope that changes in order for us to grow. On the other hand, it does give us a chance to think of even better solutions.
The reason why those ideas worry me is that it stops being about a trustless decentralized/distributed based network and more about major hubs and high fees. I worry that small payments will die off and large payments cost more than on chain fees.
My saving grace, at the end of the day, is that we resort to satoshi's original vision of payment channels between two parties. No routing, no gossip, no threat vectors. Just an IOU that settles on chain between two parties, even if it's just a user->merchant one way solution. That can still be an improvement to bitcoin today. Or friendship channels as @futurepaul likes to talk about them.
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Thanks for your insight here. Should we continue down this path of hubs with high fees and the associated large barriers to entry and centralization aspects this poses... what sort of incentive models do you see for smaller routing nodes to stay active given the costs and maintenance?
Do you see limits to these friendship channels? Or limited blockspace for everyone to open a channel with "Amazon" or "JP Morgan Chase" and then keep it balanced?
(I apologize in advance if you have already outlined some of these answers in your work - and would love to read more on any links you recommend)
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Yeah the other concern is definitely if people think they will make any sort of profitable returns running a normal lightweight routing node. I think we should throw those expectations out the window. And you're right, at the moment there's some chain space issues if everyone wanted to open a channel with all the places they wanted to interact with, but that's kind of what I'm alluding to with it's worst case scenario, it will be more selective but still benefitial for certain use cases if we got to the point where routing is problematic at scale.
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