2022 Dec 20

• Responded to some feedback on my PR and added functionality for finding and parsing the .cookie RPC auth file. Did some pretty solid refactoring, and in general my code seems quite simple. Yet it is still somewhat surprising all the different cases that come up for simply getting some credentials.

• Continuing on my Rust journey. Learning all the different functions for handling Results and Options such as or_else, ok_or, map_err, and more.

• Also learned about some Rust filesystem stuff. Can’t specify ~ character in a path which I guess makes sense since that’s an OS specific thing. And for finding $HOME, cargo and std apparently use a dependency, and have a deprecated std::env::home_dir function. Something funky that I wouldn’t expect from Rust. Honestly realizing Rust has a fair amount of clutter/things that are not super clean, but it’s still good. It’s just also like every other programming language in this respect. Nothing’s perfect.

• Thought about the practicality of multi-path payments. I thought I heard somewhere that MPP are a cool concept but not actually that practical. I was thinking about it and it does make sense. In theory it seems like this payment channel system can unlock this ability to utilize liquidity in many place to route larger volumes. In practice, not only are you scaling up the amount of routing compute you have to do (lots of probing and knowledge of the network required to find multi-path route), the likelihood that all these paths exist and work may be very low. I can imagine how someone might make it atomic so I’m not worried about that at least, although I would like to look into that a bit more. My mind’s not made up however, still think it could have potential. Could at the least be very useful for just having more routing options across smaller number of hops.