From dmytro.piatkivskyi at ntnu.no Tue Jul 24 11:00:26 2018 From: dmytro.piatkivskyi at ntnu.no (Dmytro Piatkivskyi) Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2018 11:00:26 +0000 Subject: [Lightning-dev] Virtual channels Message-ID: Dear list, pardon me that I haven't investigated the Lightning implementations in depth yet, but one discussion has made me wonder how you approach the below described situation. Rene was talking about virtual channels in his article [1]. His motivation was that a company running multiple nodes has to open channels between its own nodes in order to transact between them. My vision of LN was to allow for much heterogeneity. Not only a company should be able to transact between its own nodes, but also with other entities it has a trust relationship with. Let me give you an example. Say I trust you unconditionally. Alice asks me to send a satoshi to Bob. I don't have a channel with him, but you do. No channel between us. I receive HTLC from Alice, give you the image. You create HTLC with Bob, using that image. Bob checks - everything is OK. Bob executes. The problem is source routing. Alice creates the whole payment chain, so she should be aware of our relationship. A solution could be advertising our trust as being a single node or introducing virtual channels as Rene suggests, constantly figuring out our respective balances. Is there a way to do so or do you see any other solution? I understand the word 'trust' is repulsive, but think of the case with a single company running multiple nodes for whatever reason. Thanks, Dima [1] https://www.rene-pickhardt.de/virtual-payment-channels-for-the-lightning-network-a-lightning-network-improvement-proposal-draft/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: