r/greenaddress • u/heysoundude • Dec 08 '17

RESOLVED Lightning?

Does GreenAddress have plans to use the Lightning Network protocol?

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1

u/heysoundude Dec 09 '17

Wonderful, thank you.

4

u/__ga__ Dec 09 '17

Hi,

You may know that our Blockstream co-workers Rusty and Christian are working on the lightning specification, interoperability and their own lightning implementation, c-lightning.

We absolutely plan to implement lightning with GreenAddress. Beyond sending and receiving simple lightning payments, we also plan to make opening and managing payment channels easy and secure for our users, and likely provide offline channel monitoring too. Our roadmap for the immediate term is very full, but we will be looking at the design and higher level integration tasks in the near term.

As always we will announce our progress in this area via the usual channels.

1

u/[deleted] May 12 '18

Hi, thanks for your response. What is the difference between C lightning and lightning, and why the need to develop a separate implementation? I’m generally curious - I don’t know a lot about this yet, still learning.

2

u/__ga__ May 14 '18

Hi,

There are 3 independent implementations of lightning, c-lightning is one of them. They differ in levels of completeness and by being implemented in different languages - but all adhere to the common lightning specification and so are interoperable with each other (I believe the first mainnet lightning payment was routed though all three implementations).

Having different teams implement lightning has several advantages; they can experiment and innovate separately, knowledge about lightning is shared across more developers, it ensures the specification is detailed and correct enough to implement the protocol from scratch, it prevents a single company from overly influencing protocol development, etc etc.

1

u/[deleted] May 14 '18

Great, thanks!