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

[Matt Corallo]

Because writing connection logic and peer management is really not that complicated compared to HTLC state machines and the rest of lightning. For crypto, lighting does use the noise framework, though the resulting code is so simple (in a good way) that its super easy to just write it yourself instead of fighting with a dependency.

Lastly, for self-respecting cryptocurrency developers, not-carefully-audited dependencies are security vulnerabilities that will expose your users’ funds. By pulling simple connection logic into a lighting implementation, it’s easier to  test/fuzz/etc with the rest of a project.

Matt

> On Feb 17, 2020, at 06:12, Alexandr Burdiyan <burdiyan at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 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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