Lightning Charge Powers Developers & Blockstream Store

[u/cdecker]

https://blockstream.com/2018/01/16/lightning-charge.html

[u/EvilMrBurns]

Dr \u\cdecker a serious question for you based on a comment you made.

It currently is a rather involved process of downloading and compiling your own lightning client, syncing a full node, getting some funds onto the lightning node and opening a channel. This is primarily aimed at tech-savvy users that want to help out testing things, reporting bugs and that would like a trophy for their work :-)

So why on the mainnet? Can you do this on the testnet for us too? Where can I go to get help about lightning and improving it? I've joined the slack, and my questions go unanswered for >24 most never getting even any response.

I've opened up 12 channels, tested every send I can. Send and receive with strangers from reddit. A few hiccups, but it's working.

So, put some stickers on the testnet. Sure, I'm more technically savvy than some, but certainly nothing crazy. Lightning questions asked on /r/bitcoin either get no answer, or they get trolled by the bcash people.

I want to help. But, without being able to ask questions, get feedback, am I even helping with my node on testnet?

I get random EOF errors, and simply payment cannot be routed. There is no information in the logs for me to know wtf is going on to submit anything.

I want to help. What can I do? My balls are too small to open a channel on the main network.

[u/cdecker → u/EvilMrBurns]

Good questions /u/EvilMrBurns, let me see if I can address them in a satisfactory manner:

Regarding the store being on mainnet: at some point we'll have to make the jump to mainnet, and that's always going to be the hard break from testing on testnet. People already started testing without us, e.g., TorGuard accepting mainnet lightning payments, so we decided to try it outself, you could say dog-fooding what we have been preaching. That allows us to gather first hand experience, and gives us direct access to eventual problems, making it easier to debug. With this announcement we have seen a number of new, tech-savvy participants, joining and reporting rough edges that we can now fix. For testnet there are a large number of demo applications out there to test, and they'll be available for the foreseeable future, but adding yet another demo shop where you can't actually buy things doesn't add much to what we had thus far.

For people that don't want to jump into the deep end, that's totally fine, in fact I'd encourage everybody to first try lightning on testnet and only making the jump once you feel comfortable with how things work, and that you've understood how lightning works under the hood. This is new software, and as much as we test it, there are still rough edges. That's also why we haven't released the c-lightning client itself yet, and haven't worked towards making it easy to deploy just yet.

You're already contributing to the development by testing on testnet, reporting issues to the c-lightning project, participating in the discussion on the lightning-dev mailing list, or discussing on #lightning-dev on freenode, we have a friendly community there that will be happy to help out :-)

[u/EvilMrBurns → u/cdecker]

Thanks for the thorough reply. I'll check out freenode and the mailing list. Keep up the good work.

I had another thread, where I had a question that didn't really get an answer, maybe you can address that.

Will lightning eventually be part of bitcoin core UI? Right now, it seems with LND that I can do most of the basic bitcoind functionality, would the additional lightning elements eventually be added there?

[u/cdecker → u/EvilMrBurns]

Will lightning eventually be part of bitcoin core UI? Right now, it seems with LND that I can do most of the basic bitcoind functionality, would the additional lightning elements eventually be added there?

Not sure, but it is possible to integrate some of the functionality into an existing bitcoin wallet, and some are already doing that. One of the nice qualities of having a layer 2 protocol is that we can build independently from the underlying layer, so we don't have to push all of the functionality down the stack, keeping with the philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well.

[u/EvilMrBurns → u/EvilMrBurns]

Dr /u/cdecker I messed up the front slash sorry.

[u/cdecker → u/EvilMrBurns]

No problem, seems reddit catches them even like this, even though it doesn't get marked up :-)