Lightning Dev Summit Topics

[vincenzopalazzo]

LN Summit 2024 Topics

Tracking issue to collect the topics that folks are interested in discussing during the lightning dev summit in September.

Please submit topics that you would like to discuss in the comments.

General Guidelines:

• Where possible, please try to post topics in advance so that other attendees have time to prepare!
• Short summaries and links to additional resources relevant to your topic are very helpful.
• Feel free to post a topic you're interested in even if you don't want to present/lead a discussion on it.

The notes from last year's summit can be found here.

[moneyball]

How do folks feel about spending 1 if not 2 of the 3 days discussing some of the biggest fundamental challenges with the LN protocol as it is today and then potential long-term solutions?

Example fundamental challenges with LN:

1. Onboarding costs for new users (due to on-chain costs and cost of capital)
2. Small balances aren't economically feasible (due to on-chain costs)
3. Regulatory/trust challenges with channel management for mobile users
4. LN today is a step in the wrong direction to achieve p2p digital cash as it needs numerous cloud servers/services (block/txn data, LN state backup, RGS-like service for performant pathfinding, probing scoring data service, LSP/JIT channel partner, async payments channel partner)

Nothing would be off limits for solutions including long-proposed ideas such as eltoo/LN Symmetry, channel factories, and coinpools as well as more recent proposals such as sidepools and timeout trees. Protocol changes that require bitcoin consensus changes around covenants or GSR would be within scope of discussion.

Thoughts?

[t-bast]

I completely agree with @moneyball's proposal and think it's worth spending 2 days on that topic. We're at a stage right now where we're all working on implementing a few large improvements for which the spec is somewhat final (dual-funding, splicing, taproot, bolt 12, liquidity ads). These features have been discussed at length already and simply need engineering effort to get to the finish line, without any significant blocker. It's a great time to brainstorm what happens next, after all of these features, and ensure that we're working towards a satisfying long-term network!

And we can keep 1 day to iron out the details of some of the short / medium term work.

[vincenzopalazzo]

From my perspective, there are a few points I'd like to discuss that can fit well inside 2h of the 3th day after we discuss the fundamental limitation of the current lightning, and also could help to improve the "engineering effort" required to implement features proposed like dual-funding, splicing, taproot, bolt 12, liquidity ads.

• If I manage to finish a Proof of Concept (PoC) for the new lnprototest by the summit, I'd like to give a demo preview to gather overall feedback.
• I'd also like to discuss our decision to use Delving Bitcoin and gather feedback on whether we should continue with it or consider alternative ML approaches. See for initial discussion meta: update the link to the ML #1170
• Regarding Delving Bitcoin, I believe it introduces another issue concerning how we handle significant pull requests (PRs) like offers or splicing. As one of the implementors of these features, I find it challenging to track PRs without resorting to "pushing my version" and resolving issues later.
• Last but not least, I would like to discuss the possibility of introducing a user story section inside the BOLTs proposal, for context: When we introduce new features would be helpful to have a description of the feature as a user story. An example is the route blinding and I think we need one for 0-conf and anchor outputs. IMHO there is no reason to have a speck if it is difficult for external people to understand it.