From rusty at rustcorp.com.au Wed Dec 9 10:19:25 2015 From: rusty at rustcorp.com.au (Rusty Russell) Date: Wed, 09 Dec 2015 20:49:25 +1030 Subject: [Lightning-dev] Onion-Routing for Messages In-Reply-To: <5667F830.7050904@blockchain.com> References: <56670FB2.7030108@blockchain.com> <5667F830.7050904@blockchain.com> Message-ID: <87mvtjj55e.fsf@rustcorp.com.au> Mats Jerratsch via Lightning-dev writes: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA512 > >> I have sort of lost track of preferences regarding what is to be >> sent through onion routing versus what's not... > > Agree, it hasn't been on list for quite some time, the last time we > discussed it, we only included the route in there. Yes, plus some padding for future stuff. There are two ideas here. One is the passing of messages over the lightning network. The other is a rendezvous node for payments. Fortunately, the two can be extricated. The vendor negotiates with a node to forward a payment, then tells the buyer to route to that node. Buyer doesn't need to know it's not the final recipient; there's no protocol change. Provision of messaging is an interesting idea, but as you point out there are problems with payments. If we use lightning for this, then the recipient will just claim the route failed and not pay for the message. If we don't use lightning, we have to trust the nodes instead. If we don't charge, we worry about spam. More generally, reinventing a p2p messaging network seems outside scope. The good news is that there's nothing stopping us doing so in a future revision (is there?). Cheers, Rusty. PS. Congratulations on the job!!