Not a big set of changes but during this week I talked to spiral.xyz who are very interested and gave me good feedback that helps me refine, reduce the scope and improve the focus of the project.
The main changes you can now see in the white paper are:
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focusing on nodes as being exits for the services they require (BTC/LN), service is public, but client is anonymised
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elaborating a little on how exit traffic will be charged, and the path of information enabling clients to keep sync with the routers in accounting of session state for the source route onion construction
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a little more detail about how the payment protocol acknowledgement works, it is similar to traceroute but the sender provides the onions to route back the acknowledgements, protecting client anonymity, rather than simple reverse paths
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creating a mechanism where the entities funding the development and maintenance can collect a "developers/investors fee" in the payment protocol interposed as a 2nd intermediate hop to the router, set up as a commission on the payment to the routers
I will be hearing back from Spiral most likely next week and hopefully there will be some kind of sponsorship and organisational/project management support.
The narrowing of the scope to Bitcoin/Lightning Network specific needs will help this get to first release sooner and once the network starts to grow in size, its capacity and the economics needed for more general use purposes such as other kinds of publicly advertised servers and anonymised hidden services.
If the system is integrated more broadly with Lightning Network, the non-Bitcoin related services the network can provide will also produce a greater liquidity for the network, via the constant omnidirectional flow created by the payment protocol.