2022 Dec 21

• I’m starting to understand more about what there is to work on in lightning. One aspect is infrastructure.

  • The lightning network is strongly analogous to the internet. It’s a network of channels and nodes, but instead of sending information packets, you’re sending sats. And instead of just transporting data for free, you’re moving channel volume, this makes things harder. And instead of just making everything basically public, you’re trying to supply tooling to allow people to protect their privacy.

  • Recently learned about LSPs. Just like the internet, the network doesn’t just work if people have computers. There’s a lot of infrastructure that will go into making the lightning network work as seamlessly as the internet does today. LSPs are one part of that. They allow for immediate inbound capacity, rebalancing channels, routing, opening channels, and more. And in a similar way that connecting to a pool of nostr relays allows for properties of decentralization is one misbehaves, having competing LSPs can have a similar effect.

• Why can’t you just give poor people money? It’s a temporary patch on a systemic wound. You can give them money, and they may help people temporarily, and it would seem like you’ve essentially taxed the rich and helped the poor. But it causes inflation without actually empowering poorer people to earn more, so after some years it’ll be back to a similar situation. Maybe if you gave them a lot of wealth, or distributed it greater over time or something, but that probably requires more money and execution than is reasonably feasible. It makes sense that people try to target other forms of economic empowerment, i.e. increasing access to opportunities to build wealth, whether that means access to financial tools to be able to save, invest, or start a business more effectively, or education to be able to gain the skills required to work a higher-paying occupation.

• Heard about Sensei in the past week looking into LDK stuff, but just discovered John Cantrell. This thread was great.

• Lately finally concretely got the difference between source-based and destination-based (forgot the name, IP based?) routing: source-based is that the sender finds the full route (allows for onions → privacy), dest-based is where you can reveal yourself and the destination but now each node along the way can help out in determining the route. Pretty simple concept but for some reason never totally clicked. Interesting, a VPN is basically a trampoline node.

• No println!("{var_name}") until Rust 1.57.0.

• Setup my NIP-05 identifier.