"When channel is funded in a special way an amount present in it can be spent immediately, without waiting for a funding transaction to become confirmed. This introduces no additional risks to either channel side, can be standardized with minor Lightning protocol changes and works on TestNet today..."
Instant channels enable safe Lightning payments with unconfirmed funding
Instant channels enable safe Lightning payments with unconfirmed funding
tomosan
posted in
Lightning Network
2019-02-12T12:36:33.6400000
By spent - I assume this means on LN. So the balance of the channel can be adjusted up to the point it is mined into the blockchain for the funding transaction, and it's just regular LN going forward.
The only risk I see is that the channel state for payments needs to be tracked, and what if an older state is confirmed onto the blockchain. This could result in invalidated LN transactions - no? I don't think this is entirely "safe" at first glance. I think it needs extensive testing and vetting before I would trust this.
The idea is awsome!
The idea is excelent!
For exaplne:
You buy a channel [0,1BTC] from me and you pay me a 0,05BTC + my fee.
So the channel is setup with PUSH funds to You.
The idea is excelent to speed up the usage of the LN. You can pay using LN right a way but You can't recive.
The thing is that the founder is in charge of the found any way :)
The idea is excelent!
For exaplne:
You buy a channel [0,1BTC] from me and you pay me a 0,05BTC + my fee.
So the channel is setup with PUSH funds to You.
The idea is excelent to speed up the usage of the LN. You can pay using LN right a way but You can't recive.
The thing is that the founder is in charge of the found any way :)
You can pay using LN right a way but You can't reciveAlmost - except they are not talking about a single push transaction. I believe they are saying like 100x LN transactions before the opening transaction is confirmed. I don't see how this can be made secure.
I hope I can be proven wrong here, or maybe misunderstood the proposal.
I think what Anton is saying is that the channel states update. Any funds moved would be moved through another channel, so you would already need pre-existing funds in your LN wallet to spend, as you cannot through the zero-conf opening channel. So, if the channel fails, the channel states were updated and someone ends up owing someone in cash or for the good/service performed. Essentially, it allows for safe channel opening and spending ASSUMING you are willing to take the risk of a channel opening and losing funds from what appears to be that channel but is actually another channel. So the receiver takes the risk to spend. But the most likely scenario of this type of business is an exchange or channel opening service where you paid fiat to have a channel opened and an amount pushed to you, so it's likely you could just contact customer support and have them push you those funds again
you would already need pre-existing funds in your LN wallet to spendThat's not what the video seems to show. You can see that the wallet balance was 0, and the balance was from an incoming push tx to establish the wallet balance. Then the channel was updated.
I still can't see any scenario where this is risk-free.
I tried it on testnet and it feels magical. You click the QR code at https://lightning-wallet.com/instant/ with testnet wallet and instantly you have a channel and I paid starblocks right away.
Security is another thing. I would think twice before paying fiat or anything for this because they could double spend it very easily.