Interesting stuff. Yes, private channels and isolating the location invoices are relayed to users from the server also makes a lot of sense.

In our plans for Indranet we have also discussed the subject of Indra routing channels as well. Indranet's initial MVP is only client side privacy, being derived partly from the HORNET protocol, the other end of the circuit is a public Indra node with LND running on it. This would enable not only private channels but private channels with one end being completely hidden.

Another idea we have relates to how we are going to implement the p2p network seed nodes in Indranet. This will enable us to interpose and collect a kind of toll for payment traffic on Indranet as clients will open a few channels to our seed nodes, eliminating the complexity on the client side, while providing a revenue stream to keep us afloat and continuing to improve the system.

During the discussion in which my colleague proposed this idea I also pointed out that effectively relay nodes have the option to not connect their channels to the broader LN network and only some nodes will have channels out to the rest of the network. They only have to connect to the Bitcoin main net.

As a relative beginner with LN, one of the things that struck me as problematic is it seems like most LN providers require quite large channels, certainly larger than average third world LN node runners would be able to do. I am not even in the third world but I don't have enough sats to open channels with my Zap wallet, which I find really annoying. Indra's channels will be quite small, and this also leads in to why we need to use AMP - because sometimes there simply won't be a wide enough channel even though a relay has enough on their channels.

(as an aside, one of the things that I think Indra will provide is a relatively self balancing channel graph because of the intentional randomisation of selection of relays in client circuits, which would also combine with AMP to lower the channel balancing labor cost).

I am subscribed to the main LN dev mailing list, also, and it's a recent topic that has come up, how to handle payment processing where nodes are intermittently online.

Practical use cases like these are what is going to make Lightning Network into a thing.

Outside of that, another privacy feature that Indranet will enable is relaying on chain transactions far distant from the location of the private keys that are used in them.

It is one of the things about Monero that is a real, tangible advantage over Bitcoin - the fact that you can't correlate a transaction to a location or key. Sure, the transaction can be seen emanating from your IP address, but spending it or correlating it to the rest of your keys is basically infeasible.

So far, LN doesn't really enable this, but I think with techniques like you are discussing, especially the private banks, people will be able to hold their sats while reducing the risk of racketeers using spying nodes to capture traffic flow and locating users with balances big enough to be worth mounting a physical attack. This is a key thing we want to eliminate. In every bull market there is news stories about people being extorted to give up their wallets. I hope this will become a thing of the past as we get Indra up and running.