[Lightning-dev] Using libp2p as a communication protocol for Lightning

Alexandr Burdiyan burdiyan at gmail.com
Mon Feb 17 14:12:31 UTC 2020


Hi everyone!

Since I recently started digging into all-things-peer-to-peer, I found that there’s a lot of fragmentation between many different projects that seemingly have a lot of things in common, like networking, encoding standards, and etc. I suppose there’re lots of historical reasons for that.

More concretely for Lightning, I wonder why it couldn’t use some existing open source technologies and standards, like libp2p [1] for communication, or various multiformats [2] standards for addresses, hashes and encodings?

I do think that building and evolving common toolkits and standards for decentralized system like libp2p, or multiformats, or IPLD [3] could be something very useful for the whole community. Currently, it feels like everyone wants to go so fast, so there’s no time for coordination and consensus to build these kinds of specs. That is understandable. But I wonder if Lightning community ever looked at projects like libp2p and multiformats, or maybe is considering to implement them in lightning. Or maybe there was a decision of not using them for some reason that I might be missing.

[1]: https://libp2p.io
[2]: https://multiformats.io
[3]: https://ipld.io

Thanks!

Alexandr Burdiyan
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