Re: [Lightning-dev] A proposal for up-front payments.

[Yaacov Akiba Slama]

On 08/11/2019 16:15, Joost Jager wrote: >     The goal of this pre-payment proposal is to remove the need for >     trusted parties > > Trust isn't the right word. It is a level of service that you provide > to your peers. If nodes are cognizant of the fact that the level of > service they receive goes down if they forward spam, they will be > careful on the incoming side. Require peers to build up a reputation > before increasing the inbound limits that apply to the channels with them.  We can learn from the current situation in emails, that a system based on reputation tends to concentrate the power in the hands of few big and strong actors (gmail and co). If we have from the beginning a mechanism to fight against spam by paying to send message, we can perhaps have a really distributed system which cannot be censured. Can you elaborate on this a bit further? If you consider rate limiting to be a form of censoring, then you can still censor if there is a prepay. There are situations when lot of people need to send each other lot of messages in a small period of time, in protests for instance. In this case, people are ready to pay a little to communicate. It's true that they can be censored even when paying for messaging, but in this case, it's a voluntary (and politic) decision. But when using a rate limiting mechanism, it's an economic decision with politic implications. I am not too familiar with the current state of email servers, to what extent power is concentrated now and how that evolution translates to Lightning. Currently, if you install a smtp server in you home computer or in a server you rent and you try to send an email to someone with an email from any big provider, it will be marked as spam, because you need to have a good "reputation". And if you try to send so called "marketing" emails, you'll be marked as spammer even if the same emails sent by big providers are not rejected. This is the effect of using any reputation system. The path from reputation to propaganda is very short. One difference is that afaik emails don't traverse a path through multiple mail "nodes". Another is that inboxes of users are very centralized (gmail and co). I can imagine a system where people who want to use the messaging system based on Lightning will have to open a channel to big nodes in order to be able to reach their recipient. In this case, those big nodes can censor as they want because they have access to a lot of metadata.

_______________________________________________
Lightning-dev mailing list
Lightning-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/lightning-dev