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L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure

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Re: L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure

#61

Post by [deleted] »

clarkmoody wrote: post #33
roughly wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We must do something, this is something, therefore we must do it" "Micropayments are desperately needed" - this is true. "I don't see modern payment networks doing anything to get there" - this is also true. Neither of those imply we must solve this problem with Bitcoin, and neither of them contradict OP's statement. Bitcoin is slow, energy inefficient, and a shit transaction currency because of philosophies built i…

If you took time to check out the link, you would see that this post is about the Lightning Network, which can support massive transactional volume.

[deleted]

Re: L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure

#62

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

motohagiography wrote: post #30
Hizonner wrote: post #15

Bitcoin is not acceptable in 2024, and Lightning doesn't help. Nothing based on a PoW cryptocurrency should get any support from anybody.

The customer for this L402 protocol is obviously a media network, especially ebooks, and plausibly an alternative to spotify, applemusic and closer to the bandcamp model, content providers of all kinds who are currently subject to the chokepoint of payment processors. Emerging use cases would be domain specific LLMs trained on proprietary data sets in health, legal, accounting, and other professions. What it needs is…

These content aggregator types sound a lot like the kind of centralization that bitcoin designed to rid us of.

Re: L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure

#63

Post by RustyRussell »

dinobones wrote: post #17
RustyRussell wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This does not seem accurate, but perhaps I'm too close to see it? Do you have a source for this?

Uhh.. how about the fact that almost no wallets/exchanges/no one uses it? https://www.reddit.com/r/lightningnetwork/comments/190orn6/c... There are a ton of outstanding technical issues that lightning has had that have just kind of been glossed over for the past half-decade because people start companies, raise funding, build small fortunes and their success is predicated on pretending those fundamental technical iss…

That's a long stretch from "why aren't we seeing more adoption" to your assertion that "no wallets/exchanges/no one uses it"?

Because payments happen been pairs, there's no easy count of activity. The best estimates I know of are things like https://blog.river.com/the-lightning-network-in-2023/ which is almost 12 months old.

As to "no wallets support it", that's a strange thing to say, since lightning wallets support it, obviously.

I'm yet to see any comparable statistics in L2s on Ethereum? Was hoping you'd have something there, too :(

Re: L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure

#64

Post by RustyRussell »

Bluestein wrote: post #12
RustyRussell wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably the macaroon itself contains a shortish timeout. You can rate-limit (runes do this, which are simplified macaroons) but then the server is no longer stateless. Pretty sure I've ranted about this in HN comments before, could dig it out if you're interested?

Would appreciate it if you did, be so kind ...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39210946

Heres the inline:

See https://github.com/rustyrussell/runes for a simpler alternative and implementation (this has C and Python, but there's also a Rust implementation because why not?)

However, the "no db access" property has proven to be untenable in practice. Users end up wanting to see what runes are issued, blacklist them, know when they were last used, and have rate limits. The last two are a killer, requiring some state to be kept (unless your system allows you to return a modified rune to the user, which is a different workflow from normal bearer creds).

Re: L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure

#65

Post by positiveblue »

Disclaimer: I am the founder of Fewsats, former Lightning Labs employee and owner of the L402.org domain

I'd like to clarify a few points and add some context to the discussion.

1) Protocol: While the current implementation of the L402 flow uses macaroons for credentials and Lightning invoices for challenges, the protocol itself is agnostic to these specifics. As long as the challenge has a verifiable "proof of completion" and a way to identify the credentials, the L402 flow can work with other types of credentials and challenges.

2) Micropayments: While L402 supports micropayments, it's not limited to them. At Fewsats, we use L402 for subscription-based services with standard SaaS payment amounts, issuing macaroons with 1-month expiration dates.

3) Multi-currency support: The Lightning Network currently uses Bitcoin, but with the introduction of Taproot Assets (also from Lightning Labs), it will natively support other currencies like stablecoins (USDt?)

4) Open Protocols: The Lightning Network and L402 are open, decentralized protocols that anyone can use and integrate without depending on any specific third party. There's no native token, ICO, or controlling company, making comparisons to bankrupt entities irrelevant.

5) Network health: The Lightning Network has been operational for years and continues to grow and evolve, with developments like L402 and Taproot Assets enhancing its capabilities and utility I would say it's future looks better than ever.

If I forgot anything feel free to as me in a comment.

Re: L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure

#66

Post by positiveblue »

raytopia wrote: post #31

I was hoping this had to do with Sales Tax and VAT remittance because that's the hardest part.

Unfortunately, that is so complex and changes so often that should not be implemented at protocol level, but around it.

P.S: I feel you :)

Re: L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure

#67

Post by fragmede »

nemomarx wrote: post #27
fragmede wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In cryptocurrency, if you don't trust the person you're paying, you can check the program being called and its outputs and see the previous runs of the program distributing the currency to other accounts.

How do I know the accounts of all the people involved in creating it or etc? That feels like a lot of burden on the consumer of the media. Maybe if you had inspection tools that helped automate that lookup, or some sort of DNS esque catalog of addresses?

It starts to get complicated with more than a single author. I'm not associated with L402, just mentioning properties of the system.

Re: L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure

#68

Post by sofixa »

hakfoo wrote: post #48
fragmede wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The number of installs of adblocking software would seem to contradict you. Consumers are cheap and don't want to pay for things, but they also don't want to watch ads. They also don't want 15 $10 subscriptions to things they barely use. But they also want to support creators. So there's some intersection point where people are willing to put some money in, and receive fewer and less aggressive advertisements in exch…

The answer is federation. Don't try to sell me "subscribing to one specific blog", sell me a sensibly curated and rich network. People might be willing to pay $10 per month for a broad spectrum of quality content, but they don't want to spend 13 cents for a given arbitrary single article. It's an annoying decision burden, even if you try to shunt it away from them with delayed end-of-month billing (constant fear of a…

There was something similar with Coil.com, based on the Web Monetisation API. Basically you paid $5/month, and it was shared on a pro-rata basis between on content you consumed that supported the API. Coil themselves had content lists on their website to discover, but the goal was for the monetisation to happen organically.

It failed.

Re: L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure

#69

Post by hakfoo »

motohagiography wrote: post #53
hakfoo wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly, when you describe PoW that way, it sounds like something you'd get by giving an investor a monkey's paw. If you had a source of power, you had to use it, either directly or indirectly, to make goods and services-- satisfy actual needs somewhere-- to exchange it for stored value. Your model cuts productive economic activity right out of the loop, Why would anyone bother using their hydro/solar/nuclear resourc…

responding because your first argument is analogous to Sachs' "resource curse," where if you can make money in energy, why do anything else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse it's a good argument, but essentially presumes a nation run by public sector unions and their committees of planners is a desirable end state. 75 years ago dubai was a bunch of tents, and it is now diversifying its economy in a very s…

>but essentially presumes a nation run by public sector unions and their committees of planners is a desirable end state.

I get that this is an typical perspective for the HN crowd, but "where do I sign up?" An aspirational goal of civilization is that we should be able to cooperate and efficiently distribute labour, so we aren't all spending all our time trying to outhustle each other. Public sector unions and planning committees seem a bit more interested in that goal than VCs and and startup devs.

Dubai is an interesting example. It's not just "we have to spend the money on something", it's "our entire economy has a best-by date, whether it's via the ooze running out, or just the march of renewables and EVs, so we'd better diversify while we can afford to."

Even assuming that transport is free and 1000% green, local manufacturing capacity is important just to ensure you have some control over your needs-- look at the shipping fracas in the Middle East, and ask what products you want on the far end of a 10,000km container-ship journey?

Perhaps Scrooge McDuck is an exaggerated model, but when I see "trillion dollar companies" next to "the middle class household is typically 2+ incomes these days", I'm not sure that taming 10% inflation is what really fixes the latter.

Re: L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure

#70

Post by janandonly »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #40
kylebenzle wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

50% of what you say is 100% correct. Bitcoin was hijacked and corrupted on purpose with injected hacks like "segwit" and rbf. So you are 100% right, BTC is broken and LN doesn't help. But POW BITCOIN, as designed and built originally actually works fine at Visa-level scale while maintaining low fees. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) still functions as Bitcoin perfectly well, it just doesn't have the "crypto-bro" idiots pushing it…

Segwit made transactions smaller, right? What was the problem with it?

No, SegWit decoupled (segregated) the witness data from the signature data.

Also the signature data has a lower “weight” now.

It also happens to have been a soft fork for Bitcoin where the block size was increased to roughly 4 MB.

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