3 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
Yes the goal will be it's that simple. They were using irc announcements (like Bitcoin originally did) for new nodes, but I think they've moved on to more advanced peer discovery now (I haven't had time to catch up on the latest). Suffice to say that stuff should be highly automated and only be worried about by power users and people trying to hack new functionality into the protocol. This is exciting stuff. Very much like early Bitcoin theres a flurry of exciting tech that could be based on this.
Comment by tripledogdareya at 22/12/2017 at 05:36 UTC*
3 upvotes, 1 direct replies
A possible approach to manipulating transaction routing paths would be to control many nodes and the interconnections between them. This would provide opportunities to *farm* third party nodes connecting to these centralized subnets, consolidating them on to restricted paths optimized based on their transaction patterns and utility for channel balancing. The illusion of decentralization established in this way could help to disguise abusive rent-seeking and adverse fee behaviors. Controlling signifiant portions of a node's route options would also give these operators deanonymization capabilities, desirable by everyone from traditional marketing firms and payment providers to law enforcement and intelligence services.
The more complexity that is hidden from the user, the more trust they must place in the correctness of the software and the less ability they have to detect abusive network behavior. Users seeking the least complex use-case - mostly offline wallet, high send to receive ratio, no third party transaction routing - are therefore *most at risk* of rent-seeking and other external abuses.