RGB asset schemata: introduce minimum division for LN channels/micropayments

[dr-orlovsky]

Use a metadata field to define a minimum division for asset payments inside LN channels (equivalent to msat)

[BitcoinErrorLog]

Misc question, is there an actual need or notable utility to allowing special LN-only divisions?

I personally think people underestimate how divisibility affects economics and inflation...

I'm not saying that it is OUR problem what an issuer chooses to support, but I've always been negative towards adding units, even as decimal places.

[dr-orlovsky]

One of use cases for LN are micropayments. For instance, with USDT, we certainly would have payments <$1; especially with IoT becoming more common (like paying per second of video clip). This will be impossible if we would not support LN-style divisibility unit which must be different from mainnet unit in this case.

[BitcoinErrorLog]

Is that to say that RGB doesn't already support decimal places in the genesis on chain? If so, sure, we need some decimal places, but I thought this is about having even more places on LN than on onchain, as your (msat) example.

For example, I do not think people will need $0.000 000 001 transactions ever, if they already have $0.000 000 01 as an option. At some point the cost of processing the amount in a verifiable cycle vastly exceeds the value of the txn.

[dr-orlovsky]

No, this is not anyhow related to decimal places. Decimals are pure UI thing; internally all amounts are in smallest indivisible unit for a mainnet (like Satoshis in Bitcoin: you would not find bitcoins in bitcoin transactions). But yes; genesis defines how a large-scale unit can be composed from minimal unit with a special decimal parameter - exactly like it is done in Confidential Assets.

^^^
And this have nothing to do with the topic here, which is about micropayments in LN (equivalend of msats).

[dr-orlovsky]

Follow-up from the dev call on the 7th of Oct 2020: we do not need a separate subdivision for this case: an issuer must carry about chosing the atomic unit (i.e. already existed divisibility of the main named unit of accounting)to be sufficient for micropayments (so in case of USDT it must be not a "cent", but "millicent" or something like that).

Related discussion: #60