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@ mleku
2025-02-11 10:07:15
the big deal about #cashu is that it lets you do async payments, for when lightning is offline
well, first of all, if the lightning is offline you simply can't redeem those nuts anyway, because your lightning is offline, see?
secondly, if you want async payments, there's this thing called "bitcoin on chain", maybe you heard of it?
oh, no good for less than $100?
i'm not gonna argue that lightning network's connectivity is inherently flaky at the edges because that's just how it is, receiver makes a list of nodes to pass the payment through, and as it is doing that, one of them can become a full channel, or go offline, and then the payment will not work
as it is, lightning implementations are barely keeping up with implementing Atomic Multipath Payments but what we really need is Redundant Multipath Payments where clients make multiple paths that carry the payment in parallel and first to the other side blocks the others from being accepted
the other thing is that the p2p network of lightning network is really stingy on useful data (network intelligence, or network state consistency) to help ensure that receivers don't pick dodgy paths
i don't think that even it's on the table yet the kind of addition to bitcoin scripting that would enable a path-routed payment, or if such a thing can even be trusted, this is the challenge of state channels - who picks the paths, can be spying on you by picking their node at the first hop in the channels... and tracing you to an LNURL probably isn't that difficult either
none of the solutions existing are really sufficient, and ecash is worse than insufficient, it's a wide open field for scamming and incompetence