I have thought about how to do atomic payments to multiple parties at once over Lightning so much.
Glad to know I’m not crazy! I’ve been thinking about it for years and waiting for someone with a worthy spine to suggest it, but it’s never come up, and I need to know if I should fantasize about something else.
What I struggle with when it comes to all these approaches is -- and this is coming from the perspective that the reason we need atomic split payments is so there is no custodial element when trying to pay multiple recipients simultaneously
If there are multiple custodians it’s still useful to atomically split payments between their customers (and other self custodians).
This kind of thing definitely isn’t useful when there’s one or very few custodians, but I very much doubt that’s the future of lightning.
every participant still needs a stable, funded Lightning node for the payment to work at all
I think this is a hard problem to solve but I think it can be solved, especially when invoices and bitcoin script aren’t so primitive.