[Lightning-dev] Maintenance service for Lightning Network

[Rusty Russell]

Kumaigorodskiy Anton <anton.kumaigorodskiy at outlook.com> writes:
> Thanks for clarifying how routing data is supposed to work. Still I don't quite understand how one can make an initial payment request. What I mean is say I run a Lightning node on my phone and someone knows my bitcoin-pubkey-style ID only, how can our devices connect for me to provide all the info upon request?  

The idea was that you provide them with the information, via a QR code
or whatever.

We won't be (in the short term, at least) routing general messages over
the lightning network.

> Or perhaps there could be some deterministic method that, given a user's ID and overall network topology, would determine to what exact node should that exact ID connect? This could at least distribute the load across the network.  

It has been suggested that we use a DHT for mapping nodeid -> metadata.
That's pretty long term though.

> And then there are DDoS attacks, as far as I understand it could be fairly easy for someone to spam a Lightning device with millions of payment requests. This perhaps could be mitigated with requests rationing via blind signatures but I have no idea how to enforce that on a distributed network.

Indeed.

Cheers,
Rusty.