[Lightning-dev] BOLT 11, real time micro payments, and route redundancy

Andy Schroder info at AndySchroder.com
Wed Aug 30 03:30:50 UTC 2017


Hello,

I'm looking through BOLT 11. I don't really see an option for a refund 
address like is present in BIP 70. Is this intentional? If so, why do 
you not see that people would possibly want to receive a refund?

I'm trying to adapt my fuel pump 
(http://andyschroder.com/BitcoinVendingDevices/) to use lightening and 
it requires a refund address because their is a pre-payment required. 
Change is then immediately returned at the end of the sale for any 
unused credit. An alternative is for one's automobile to do real time 
micro pre-payments, but I'm not sure that the latency of a lightening 
payment will be low enough and the bandwidth requirement might be too 
expensive. It would likely also require people's automobiles to measure 
the product delivered and have an on board wallet. This would be ideal 
long term, but I'm not sure if it is realistic at this time.

Also, assuming that a real time micropayment is doable at the automobile 
level, what happens if one of your hops goes down in the middle of the 
product delivery? Can there be automatic alternate/redundant fail over 
routes like happens with IP traffic? It seems like this could be 
difficult with onion routing.

With all that being said, even if real time micro payments can be a 
reality, I still see many of other unrelated use cases where there may 
be a refund desired. I think that's why they put a refund address option 
in BIP 70.

Any information would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

-- 
Andy Schroder


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