pull down to refresh
What would count as a "real" standalone purpose though?
I think philosophical adherence to the model of L1 implementations
On L1, implementations exist to enforce/comply with the same rules.
(Core's monoculture has been deviating from this principle, hense the blowback, and rising interest in consensus libraries upon which to build new distributions)
On LN, implementations exists to capture users into an ecosystem of liquidity infrastructure and routing flows, hense protocol pollution and compatibility issues.
So the purpose of something new needs to be that its vertically neutral and consensus driven, therefore reusable into disparate distributions. Hardened surfaces or embedded use-cases are too specific, both would ideally be unique distributions of the same implementation.
I think CLN missed an opportunity here as they were on the scene at roughly the same time of LND, and the plug-in model was aligned to re-usability. LND hadn't built out its larger ecosystem yet, it just out-executed by being more developer friendly and active. I think the choice of C was a bad one as its hard to approach, Go was easier to build a network effect of community developers with. Blockstream was also never all-in on Lightning, they're primarily a Liquid shop.
It's LND's success in gaining overwhelming share enabled the larger ecosystem that its now optimizing for, though that was probably always the sustainability model. The problem with a new implementation, or a fork of LND, is it basically has to have no sustainability model.
gotcha, staring point is the wrong one. Your approach make sense and I guess could provide much more value to other developers and engineers coming form outside-bitcoin spaces.
Interesting is your take on the incentive structures here. What would count as a "real" standalone purpose though? Would something like "optimized for embedded systems" or "hardened against specific attack vectors" be enough, or is that still too vague?
Where you'd draw that line?