STORY
Try nolooking ⚡️👀 Node Funding in 1 Scan
AUTHOR
Dan Gould ⚡️👀Dan Gould ⚡️👀
Joined 2022.10.02
PROJECT
nolooking ⚡️👀nolooking ⚡️👀
DATE
VOTES
sats
COMMENTS

Try nolooking ⚡️👀 Node Funding in 1 Scan

It's too hard to join the lightning network

First, new node runners face tough decisions:

  • Who do I connect to?

  • How do I get someone to open a channel to me?

  • How much is this going to cost?

  • What on earth is an anchor reserve?

  • Why does my head hurt already?

Second, they face costs

  • Pay a miner fee for each deposit

  • Pay a miner fee for each channel opening

  • Wait for a confirmation to then open each channel one by one

  • Wait more for inbound

nolooking ⚡️👀 makes it cheap and easy

  • Connect in 1 scan for 1 batched transaction and huge cost and time savings

  • Sane defaults for outbound nodes & inbound capacity

  • Bonus: that transaction is a privacy-preserving PayJoin

And it’s gaining traction

You can try nolooking ⚡️👀 alpha on the Umbrel app store.

We have a bunch of new users (most seen on social media [e.g. 1, 2, 3], plus all the users we don’t even hear from!)

We’ve been featured in international press:

Boltz exchange CEO said they’re ready for a PayJoin PR

We #BuildInPublic

We’ve been making a large effort to not only share our progress in public, which is great for awareness and motivation; but we have also taken steps to learn from the public. We saw it crucial that we find out what product do users need? And what were people receptive to?

Not only have we shared our progress here on makers.bolt.fun, we’ve published tutorials, done livestreams, and showcased demos. We have made sure our struggles are in the open. Maybe we can save the next generation of bitcoin builders from some suffering. 

We’ve always asked our hardest questions out in public. We’ve shared the concept when we were just an idea, to our first live demo, made videos from the very beginning, and shared modest success with tutorials on twitter. We even broke stacker.news with maybe the highest number of upsats of all time.

We’re an async team, so 80% of our collaboration has been documented over 30 issues and 62 pull requests on the core repository. Nick’s in Australia, Dan and Armin are in US-East.

We’ve put out some e-cash experiments too, including what may have been the world’s first ecash payment processor for CashU ecash, to accept donations on our website. We also had a breather, creatively exploring what we could do with ecash by building the vault, a crazy “roulette-like” game depending on what you can figure out.

It works thanks to Pay-to-Endpoint

The tried, though often-neglected, BIP-0078 P2EP/PayJoin protocol allows bitcoin senders and receivers to collaboratively build a bitcoin transaction together. In our case, the receiver node substitutes a normal bitcoin output with an output that opens channels. They can add as many channel outputs as they like, and even add inputs breaking surveillance heuristics.

By building on P2EP we kill two birds with one stone:

  1. We make lightning node establishment cheap and accessible

  2. We bridge L1 to L2 privacy making a new reason to support PayJoin.

PayJoin is the most fundamental type of collaborative bitcoin transaction. It’s a peer-to-peer foundation of bitcoin interaction and privacy, which will break the current chain surveillance scene.

The rust-payjoin library that nolooking builds upon is designed to run on nearly any software system. It’s purpose built to plug into wallets, exchanges, and anywhere else you’d see bitcoin.

We’ll focus on privacy interfaces. You focus on your business and custody. 

Have your people talk to our people.

Our scrappy LSP has Customers

We act as a Lightning Service Provider (LSP), by manually opening channels to people when they pay us for inbound liquidity.

We have had two orders since we released Monday. We are looking at ways to automate this best, which may include expanding into running our own LSP or diving into sidecar channel tech.

Future Plans

We’ve had a public roadmap since the very beginning.

Now that we just launched an alpha on Umbrel, we want to iterate on our users’ initial feedback. Because we’re dealing with the subject of money, we owe our users an upgrade to beta robustness. Of course, people can’t lose funds. We have to handle errors better. We also have an open pull request to integrate an outbound channel recommendation engine so new users don’t have to think about their very first outbound channels to get connected. We can make their options a navigable choice.

We will be joining the Bitcoin Design community on December 6th for a UX review.

This project is one more step toward a bitcoin privacy solution, and we have big plans for that much brighter, more free future.

How can you help us now?

Bogdanoff Invites you to Join the Lightning Network (pitch video)

https://youtu.be/z02c7WoImyA

We want to push beyond hobbyist adoption. In order to get PayJoin as the standard, we need to move into enterprise products and services. To do this, we need introductions to bitcoin organizations who believe in human freedom and are willing to step to the cutting edge.

To smooth this offering, we are in the process of vetting the free and open source code we have built and depend on. We need to get it tested and reviewed by some rust & bitcoin wizards. The easier it is for us to recruit this help, the faster bitcoin gains privacy.

We’re talking livelihoods. It needs to be bulletproof.

The window for us to deliver privacy as an alternative to the CBDC pantopticon may be running out. Legends of Lightning has us speeding up.