[Lightning-dev] Proposal for Advertising Lightning nodes via DNS records.

[Tyler H]

Greetings,

A challenge end-users face is connecting to nodes with enough liquidity to
pay every merchant, and failing that, finding the merchant node in a
reasonably sane way to open a channel to them for payments.

As it is now, people find nodes in other people's visualizers, and pass
node aliases around via word of mouth which is very prone to inaccuracy and
MITM attacks. A current alternative is attempting to make a payment,
decoding the payment request, finding the node on your graph and attempting
to open a channel to the merchant.  This is only possible if the
destination is advertising addresses.

We (Robert Olsson and I) propose an additional BOLT, tentatively scheduled
to be BOLT 12, to allow for operators of domain names to create SRV records
for their nodes.  This is separate from BOLT 10's seed functionality as the
desired outcome is to get only the nodes associated with a particular
domain.  This would allow, as an example, users to say to each other
"connect to a Blockstream.com node" and the user can independently look up
that domain, find advertised nodes and connect/open channels.

This also improves security from the perspective of nodes masquerading as
other nodes, as anyone with a domain can authoritatively list their nodes.

In addition, domain operators could provide subdomains for their node
addresses to distinguish between nodes intended for a specific purpose,
from a human perspective.

Robert Olsson (rompert) and I have created
https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lightning-rfc/pull/406 as a draft of
what the RFC could look like.

Feedback is much appreciated.

Best regards,
Tyler (tyzbit)
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