lightning-dev
Scaling Lightning With Simple Covenants
Posted on: September 11, 2023 02:13 UTC
The email discusses the start of a paper that the sender has been reading on their vacation.
The sender mentions that even in the initial part of the paper, it presents some interesting possibilities. One point highlighted is that the cost of enforcement is significantly increased compared to other proposals. Instead of just one or two transactions, it now involves 10 or more. This raises the question of how much is enough when it comes to the expected fee contributed by the "dedicated user". Additionally, in the worst-case scenario of a dramatic failure by the dedicated user, there would only be a 2x penalty on the number of on-chain transactions, which may be acceptable if the network is mature enough and such failure events are rare.The email also mentions the surprisingly common case where the casual user fails to rollover, resulting in the funds being returned to the dedicated user. In this case, relying on legal and normal custody policies may be preferable to burdening the UTXO set indefinitely with the current approach. The email concludes with a thank you from the sender, Rusty.