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

l402.org

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

#81

Post by DINKDINK »

byteknight wrote: post #2

Can anyone tell me why this is any better than just logging in? This seems like its solving a problem that doesnt exist.

The cryptographic properties of an L402's HMAC provide stateless authentication/verification which sub services can then be provisioned with payments to compose API calls in novel ways.

E.g. Prior to L402, services needed to conglomerate into siloed ecosystems because there's the need for statefull authentication (Backend: Is this user who is requesting inferences allowed to run this query? How much credit account balance do they have remaining? You third party app have to integrate with me if you want to my users to be able to make calls to your module)

Post L402: A stateless service can compose a list of service calls (which all operate independently -- without the lack of competition, costs of integration, and politics of servicemodule app ecosystem -- Read OpenAI etc) to potentially 100s of services to produce the broad number of API results needed fulfill the users request. Detailed explanation and examples are provided by the company who published the FOSS L402 spec here: https://youtu.be/6u1G8QIDuNU?t=206

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

#82

Post by DINKDINK »

throw0101d wrote: post #79
RustyRussell wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If censorship resistance and reliability are your metrics, there really isn't a serious competitor. There is huge incentive to claim to be so, however! But if you're trying to build something for decades, as you should be for internet infrastructure, there isn't much option.

> If censorship resistance and reliability are your metrics, there really isn't a serious competitor. Given the public ledger of Bitcoin, I would hardly say it has "censorship resistance". On that metric I would think Monero or some such would be better: * https://www.investopedia.com/tech/five-most-private-cryptocu...

>Given the public ledger of Bitcoin, I would hardly say it has "censorship resistance".

Conflates two orthogonal issues: Identifiable payment vectors and publishing preservation / ability to be censored.

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

#83

Post by kylebenzle »

RustyRussell wrote: post #76
kylebenzle wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin Cash works for small payments as Bitcoin was originally designed to do. Artificially limiting the block size to try and push fees up as high as possible is simply not a good designe choice that was added long after Satoshi left.

It was Satoshi who introduced the block size limit though. Awkward!

Yes, TEMPORARILY, lol. Awkward for who?

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

#84

Post by kylebenzle »

RustyRussell wrote: post #9
dinobones wrote: post #7

Lightning network is mostly dead. Someone should do this but for the thriving L2 ETH ecosystem.

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

Do you just spend your time in HN to spread lies, propaganda and misinformation about LN, lol?

Lightening Labs, or whatever company owns, Lightning Network, should be able to pay for better quality shills I would think. Shame on a CEO like Elizabeth Stark for using poor innocent flobs like you to do their dirty work.

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

#85

Post by kylebenzle »

RustyRussell wrote: post #63
dinobones wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What a transparent attempt to promote a broken and dying project for your own benefit:(

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

#86

Post by JohnFen »

roughly wrote: post #49
Animats wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Micropayments are desperately needed" - this is true. Probably not. They've been proposed all the way back to Chaum's DigiCash, but no micropayment system has ever really taken off. Not just crypto schemes. Schemes to put micropayments on your cellular phone bill were a flop. Even 976 numbers never got traction outside of dial-a-porn and have mostly died out. All the enthusiasm for micropayments comes from people…

> no micropayment system has ever really taken off This is true, but it's not really the same thing as "we don't need micropayments" and "there's no configuration that would work for micropayments." Hell, ad networks are basically micropayment networks, just not for consumers, and the current economic configuration of "everything is free, we just sell all your personal data" is pretty new, so it's not like we haven't…

I agree that micropayments would be incredibly desirable. If an acceptable system came around to accomplish that, I'd use it pretty heavily (as a customer).

But if it involves cryptocurrency, I'm out.

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

#87

Post by JohnFen »

positiveblue wrote: post #65

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 compl…

Unimportant side question: why are they called "macaroons"? I find that a bit offputting in its cutesiness, and the word doesn't even give a hint as to what they are (aside from being a flavor of cookie, I guess).

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

#88

Post by boesboes »

DINKDINK wrote: post #80
throw0101d wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why? Using wasted energy at scale doesn't seem to cause significant CO2 emissions […] There is no such thing as "wasted energy". The fact that cryptocurrency mining exists means there is load on the grid, which needs to be given supply. If that load/demand goes away, then the supply can be reduced or shutdown. I.e. , if there is no demand the power would not be generated in the first place.

>There is no such thing as "wasted energy". Your argument's basis is detached from reality: https://orientalnewsng.com/global-gas-flare-heightened-by-15... Thankfully, there are market participants who are capturing this previously-wasted energy and putting it to use: https://hashrateindex.com/blog/flared-gas-bitcoin-mining-101...

if you think crypto is only using wasted energy, you are detached from reality

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

#90

Post by RamblingCTO »

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.

100% agree. blockchain is still a solution that's looking for a problem and payments ain't it. the foundational assumptions are wrong and don't match the user's reality.
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