FYI: Lightning will work across ledgers

I thought I'd mention here a snippet from a conversation I had with Jorge
Timón of Blockstream last week.  He envisions the Lightning Protocol for
Bitcoin being used to enable multi-hop transactions across different
blockchains.  All that's required is an extension to handle exchange rates
between assets other than Bitcoin.  Once that's in place, it seems to me
there's really nothing stopping Lightning from being used across any kind
of ledger -- a lot of the crypto stuff required for trustless transactions
on blockchains is overkill for more conventional non-decentralized ledgers,
but those ledgers can always masquerade as blockchains for compatibility.
It made me realize that inter-blockchain Lightning would end up quite
functionally equivalent to ILP + crypto conditions.

On Sat, Jan 21, 2017 at 11:15 AM, Jorge Timón <jtimon@jtimon.cc> wrote:

> For multi-assets [ie, cross-chain transactions], you simply need to use
> channels involving assets in 2 different chains.  You could also need to
> extend the protocol to allow conversion rates (instead of 1:1 when dealing
> only with btc)
>

The inter-blockchain/exchange rate stuff isn't written up yet, and isn't
currently a priority, but here are the links for the Lightning project.

On Mon, Jan 23, 2017 at 12:38 PM, Jorge Timón <jtimon@jtimon.cc> wrote:
>
> There's a #lightning-dev channel on freenode and a mailing list:
>
> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/
>
> Blockstream is currently paying 2 developers to work on it. Rusty
> Russel and Christian Decker.
> The 2 authors of the paper founded their own company and hired some
> more people. There's a few more companies working on it I think, or at
> least having one dev working on it.
> There's also independent contributors.
> https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning
> https://lightning.network/
>
> "These participants represent organizations including: ACINQ, Amiko
> Pay, Bcoin/Purse.io, Bitfury, Blockstream, and Lightning Labs."
> https://medium.com/@lightningnetwork/lightning-network-
> meeting-on-interoperability-and-specifications-ea49e47696a4#.l1462yjko