CLINK Protocol Demo \ stacker news ~lightning

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246 sats \ 8 comments \ @Scoresby 2 Oct lightning

zaps forwarded to @supratic (50%) @justin_shocknet (50%)

I saw @justin_shocknet post this on X, and realized that I somehow missed it when @supratic posted it here on SN.

Also, in #1245223, @nkmg1c_ventures asked if there was a way to bring attention to old posts. So, I'm taking my own advice and reposting.

CLINK is an alternative to NWC and Bolt12 invoices.

Here's how Justin Shocknet explains the need for it in this comment.

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152 sats \ 6 replies \ @justin_shocknet fwd 2 Oct

Most importantly, as of last week, you can now connect Stacker News' wallet via CLINK

#1235448

Perhaps @ek will be willing to share a bit about the developer UX publicly

136 sats \ 3 replies \ @a853296a49 2 Oct

@justin_shocknet appreciate your brain, skepticism and pursuit of innovation.

One point that is not obvious to me is: how does CLINK perform in terms of privacy? My concern using it would be that anyone paying me can see my pubkey from BOLT11. The biggest selling point of BOLT12 that I like is that it does not leak my identity via my pubkey.

102 sats \ 2 replies \ @justin_shocknet fwd 2 Oct

Good question, thanks.

CLINK is, at worst, par with Bolt12 wrt privacy. I think it's much better of course though, given the flexibility it affords.

First point of order is that Bolt12 itself doesn't actually help with privacy, things like blinded paths that it uses to justify those claims exist outside of it's context, and so the invoices CLINK serves can use that as well.

Where I think it's better is that Bolt12 is inherently tied to the receiving node for communications, where CLINK's use of nostr as an overlay network can use ephemeral or decoupled keys. It could even be used to fan out invoice serving across multiple nodes to keep an attacker guessing (our ref server doesn't do HA or randomization yet, but will eventually).

Also, since the transport is not using Lightning, that leaves fewer ways to leak metadata to your Lightning peers that could be used in a correlation attack.

Other things we can do in terms of roadmap, since we have nostr as an overlay network, is leverage that to coordinate things like lnproxy by @supertestnet which would effectively give nodes the ability to tap into a marketplace of obfuscating hops outside of the channel graph by sharding hop hints.

In short, privacy is ultimately a matter of implementation rather than protocol, but the flexibility of CLINK in using nostr as an overlay network allows those implementations to do everything Bolt12 does and much much more.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @a853296a49 2h

Right of course, I am most interested in the idea of a blinded path baked into a BOLT12 offer. Does CLINK use blinded paths or have that on the roadmap?

I am averse to lnproxy since I think it could wind up being a centralized data repository.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @justin_shocknet fwd 47m

Blinded paths are just a flag in lnd, can probably have a demo of clink using one tomorrow

Using Nostr to advertise proxies would just be a listing, the forward data wouldnt centralized, each hop would only know the next hop

119 sats \ 1 reply \ @supratic fwd 2 Oct

That's epic! For normies like me, I'm still missing how I can set up lightning.pub locally and run shockwallet in a docker (I assume it is possible, just have not figured out how yet)

Some more docs, even if AI generated, would be much useful https://docs.shock.network

102 sats \ 0 replies \ @justin_shocknet fwd 2 Oct

Yea I need to get locked in materials, I could use a developer advocate if someone is up to the task.

I'm also a little docker-tarded since I don't use it much but this should work, recently fixed the docker image runner:

https://github.com/shocknet/Lightning.Pub/blob/master/DOCKER.md

272 sats \ 0 replies \ @supratic fwd 2 Oct

The search is a great tool, here what SN know about CLINK:

by relevance: