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111 sats \ 1 reply \ @TonyGiorgio 19 Sep 2022 \ on: Countersurveillance Overlay Networks bitcoin
Very intriguing. I have a couple of questions that I am curious about.
- Is this an additional network that lives alongside LN, but not on LN? IE, LN is just the payment layer, and upon confirmation of the payment, the Indra routers will route your requests?
- If so, the LN-like components such as BOLT4 pieces you mention, are they their own adaptations that are taking the nice onion routing components of LN but are not themselves anything to do with LN anymore than they are similar tech?
- If not, are you doing anything with the TLV's of the LN payments themselves? Will it be compatible with the greater Lightning Network?
There's a few properties you describe such as pre-payments, payment tokens, rendezvous, anonymous replies, etc. that have similar concepts in the LN world and are being worked on. Are you re-implementing your own if it is its own network or are you going to reuse those when they come out?
LN currently does not have enough privacy properties as it is to be used in this manner yet, so I wonder if this is future looking that is TBD on LN development or if it's just too early for something like this to securely take place.
I won't get into the moral debates about "omg the internet should not be re-implemented on an monetarily incentivized network such as LN" just because some people don't know how to price data and networking accurately, but I'm curious if that's what is going on here?
Yeah, it may seem a little confusing, but no, it's essentially a way to provide income to cover running costs for running routers that obscure location data, like Tor, but paid.
It uses a similar protocol as BOLT#4 because it is source routed, using ECDH for secure ad hoc session encryption. Sessions are purchased and then can be used for any hop in a path, due to the source routing, meaning it is possible to vary the layering of the onions and change the paths even one message cycle to the next.
But once you have a number of sessions open you can then plot arbitrary paths through the network. And the idea is that both Bitcoin full nodes and Lightning nodes can use this to establish connections inside the network that obscure location information. Just as many banking services use off-net dialup/digital phone lines to prevent surveillance of their payment traffic, it makes sense that Lightning, being like interbank payment networks, should also have countermeasures against surveillance by potential adversaries.
Regarding the "payment layer monetary incentivised" the pricing system is just based on covering costs and a small margin of profit. The client will have parameters to load in your costs and set your margin, and clients will also set their target price point as well as be presented with a breakdown of the fee market. In actual fact, it could help create a harmonisation of bandwidth costs by providing the lower price routers greater profit opportunity and a monetary motivation for the better value services to scale up or competitors to improve their margins and offer lower prices for router services.
It is just a way to provide a service like the Tor and I2P networks but in a way that makes it economic to provide service and options for expanding the service. It will also disrupt mobile service providers, who may ultimately have to adopt an open access, in band lightning payments for access, and prod the industry towards full location security instead of the current situation where NSA et al can discover timing and endpoints of traffic and through this violate privacy and crack down on liberty activism whether it is about fixing the money or distributing information that allows prosecution of criminal activities in government.
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