I appreciate your unique perspective from actually building these solutions. Glad you're on nostr to discuss it. 💜
How do ark spillman channels carry a liveness requirement? Can the ASP double spend your VTXO input while you're offline? I was under the impression they couldn't do that. In my mental model you can get a Spillman VTXO with a 4 week timeout, go offline without worry for up to 3 weeks and 6 days. Then you just refresh the timeout once and go back offline. If the ASP "force closes" on you, there's nothing to do since your VTXO goes on chain, you already got your money out. I might be mistaken, though. I have studied lightning a lot more than ark. (Shoutout Chaincode! 🙌)
Compare this with lightning where your counterparty broadcasts a tx and you don't know the timer to act has started unless you're actively monitoring the blockchain. Once you find out, you now have to get a tx mined to protect yourself, which is a whole new set of problems. This can be delegated to a watchtower but it requires a lot more active monitoring. This is why I believe the liveness requirements are harder to manage for lightning. But you're right that spillman-ark also has a liveness requirement.
> whether they pay the tx fee directly or in opportunity cost doesn’t really matter.
Are you talking about the opportunity cost of closing a LN channel? The cost to spend low value HTLC outputs in this attack is mitigated because all the low value HTLC fee outputs are rolled up into the coinbase, which is effectively a single tx input. This is a unique advantage for miners.
> Nice thing is everything is interoperable these days.
Yeah lightning has really matured into the connective tissue of the whole bitcoin network. It's an amazing achievement. Y'all have a lot to be proud of.
> I’m honestly lost at your claim here???
> Similarly, absolutely entirely lost at what you’re even talking about.
I didn't explain fully because there's a lot there. But TL;DR I think there is a tremendous amount of potential in exogenous transaction fees. I want to build a permissionless bitcoin tx accelerator network to compete with existing mining pool closed APIs (in fact, I think it's necessary for a decentralized bitcoin network).
We can make a trust tradeoff to enable ecash tx fees. You have to trust the mint to pay out the fees but with ecash privacy properties and low value payments it can work well in practice. This solves a ton of problems in L2 protocol design. We can finally realize the dream of permissionlessly fee bumping any bitcoin transaction without the restrictions of RBF or CPFP. A lot of the insane policy rules can be circumvented. We still need to be careful about the more sane policy filters like dust outputs, bare script, etc. The worst of these can be mitigated with GCC.
Exogenous fees work for LN too. Imagine we updated the LN protocol to escrow low value payments with ecash instead of mining pools. The low value HTLC protocol vulnerabilities go away. Rug risk is minimal because fees are low and reputation is hard to earn and easy to burn. Ecash supports HTLCs so we could possibly even remove them from the commitment transaction entirely.
I haven't thoroughly explored these ideas but I believe there is A LOT of potential in this concept.