Re: FYI: Lightning will work across ledgers

On Mon, Feb 27, 2017 at 3:45 PM, Jorge Timón <jtimon@jtimon.cc> wrote:

> > I really wish the Lightning Network folks would consider isolating and
> > compartmentalizing some of their ideas into a more general system, and
> have
> > talked with a few of them in person about this, but until they do to me
> at
> > least it really doesn't seem more interesting than Interledger, just a
> lot
> > more highly-coupled and intrinsically complicated.
>
> I'm sure they would be happy to listen to concrete suggestions in this
> reward. On the other hand, I don't think they could do much with this
> vague statement by itself.


I've certainly pointed them at Interledger as an example of a layered
payment channel protocol done well, but here's a by-the-numbers comparison
of the two I did in one of my slide decks:

https://speakerdeck.com/tarcieri/a-protocol-for-interledger-payments?slide=41

Generally they have managed to produce voluminous papers and documentation
which doesn't specifically answer questions I'm concerned with or serve to
document how to actually implement the protocol (i.e. I have had trouble
using their documentation to answer specific questions about constructions)

Their documentation is simultaneously extremely verbose and vague. It's not
structured in terms of core ideas and subcomponents that can build on top
of it. Instead it's highly coupled, overly complex, and poorly described.

Some specific, prescriptive advice would be to extract the core ideas into
a self-contained document. I think they should be able to describe the core
protocol, in a completely self-contained manner, with enough specificity to
serve an implementer, in 20-30 pages.

>From there, they could layer on additional, optional functionality as
add-ons.

Instead they have a complex, highly coupled protocol with many intermingled
components trying to do a lot of things at the same time, and it's not
clear how effective it is at any of them. It's hard to think about any of
these components in isolation.