Re: FYI: Lightning will work across ledgers

On Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 1:47 AM, Evan Schwartz <evan@ripple.com> wrote:

> The first split is probably the biggest, and that's whether you build
> internetworking into blockchains/ledgers or build a separate component to
> handle internetworking. In approaches like Cosmos
> <https://cosmos.network/whitepaper> / Polkadot <http://polkadot.io/>,
> blockchains must be specifically designed to be part of those systems and
> must be aware of or subservient to one or more other blockchains. This
> could allow a deeper type of integration, but comes with a complexity
> tradeoff. With Lightning / Interledger, internetworking is handled by a
> separate component (Lightning nodes or Interledger Connectors). This is
> simpler and can incorporate a wider variety of ledgers, but is primarily
> useful for trading assets of value across ledgers. Interledger also uses an
> abstraction over the functionality expected from the ledger layer (instead
> of building simpler ledgers to imitate blockchains) and tries to minimize
> the functionality required from the ledger layer.
>

I've often tried to make analogies to OSI layer 2 vs layer 3 when
describing systems like Cosmos or Polkadot versus Interledger. They seem
somewhat orthogonal in that you could layer Interledger atop
Cosmos/Polkadot.