[Lightning-dev] LN public marketplaces (exchanges)

[ZmnSCPxj]

Good Morning,

My understanding of your idea is the below:

1.  I set up as a middleman from the base blockchain to the LN.
2.  You send me an onchain transaction plus a fee and after 0 confirmations (!! risk) I send to the recipient on LN.

But please consider that you could run an LN node yourself, open a channel (and spend any fees you might have paid to me in the channel opening) and then sent to the recipient on LN yourself.  Further, you can afterwards make future payments to LN for low fees yourself, without having to make a new onchain transaction each time.  So I see no benefit to you using this service.

Regards,
ZmnSCPxj

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [Lightning-dev] LN public marketplaces (exchanges)
Local Time: December 12, 2017 7:08 AM
UTC Time: December 11, 2017 11:08 PM
From: um4711 at mutluit.com
To: lightning-dev at lists.linuxfoundation.org

Christian Decker wrote on 12/11/2017 11:59 AM:
Not sure I fully understand the use-case you are referring to. Is this
supposed to be a short-term loan to get a bill paid or is this supposed
to facilitate muli-hop payments? In the former case there is no support
for it yet, since all of the payments in LN are always fully backed by
Bitcoin. In the latter case, I don't see how that differs from the
multi-hop payments we already do.

I must admit I'm new to LN and don't know yet if it can be used
in setting up such a scenario:

A bitcoin transaction usually takes at least 10 minutes for confirmation.
An instant payment could be realised if a middleman pays out the amount
to the receiver immediately, and gets his money back from the original
sender the normal way (ie. waiting the 10+ minutes).

The middlemen (ie. other users) would announce their such service at
a marketplace (the highest amount he/she is willing to overtake plus
the fees he/she wants). With each transaction, Bitcoin would pick
the best offer from the orderbook of the maketplace and process the
transaction that way (ie. swapping the receiver by the middleman).

The advantages: the receiver gets the money instantly,
and any user can play middleman (hence an exchange for it),
the middlemen earn from the fees, exchanges get established, ...

Just an idea...

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