On the scalability issues of onboarding millions of LN mobile clients

Antoine Riard and Laolu are discussing the challenges of designing a mobile-first Lightning Network (LN) experience. They pointed out that building a scalable, secure, private chain access backend for millions of LN clients remains a problem. Although light client protocols for LN exist, they still have concerns about their privacy and security guarantees.Laolu suggests introducing monetary compensation in exchange for servicing filters and using LSATs to add a lightweight payment mechanism by inserting a new proxy server in front of the filter/header infrastructure. This can reduce syncing time by taking advantage of all established CDNs and anycast serving infrastructure while also more widely distributing the load of light clients using the existing web infrastructure.However, the scalability of BIP157 clients is a concern as it may lead to an imbalance between the number of clients and full-nodes, resulting in centralized services. Full-node operators have indirect incentives to participate in network relay to guarantee censorship-resistance. It is unclear whether node operators will want to serve light client data en masse without monetary compensation.Monetary compensation could be introduced within the watchtower paradigm to price chain access resources using micro-payment capabilities. The LN security model diverges hugely from basic on-chain transactions, and malicious light client servers can lie to users about the state of their channel, which can compromise user funds.While relying on a small number of full-node operators being nice and servicing millions of LN mobile clients may work for now, it is essential to consider alternative solutions to ensure the health and security of the backbone network. The discussion highlights the importance of incentives for node operators to dedicate long-term resources to clients they have lower reasons to care about otherwise.