Intro

As a bootstrapped startup, its impossible to do everything you want to do. The vision we had when starting Shockwallet in 2018 was too big for a lean team. Eventually, we had to focus on where we had product fit, which turned into Lightning.Video.

On the precipice of WebApp launch for LV, we're looking back in-order to look forward, at how these missing pieces can work together to reclaim the web.

The evolution of the space has validated demand for a number of our earlier concepts including distributed custody, and web-native UX through zero-configuration networking.

It has been painful though to watch the execution of workarounds to these problems miss the point entirely, and the timing of this hackathon presents us with an opportunity to hopefully nudge things in the right direction.

Problem:

The biggest issue preventing self-hosted nodes from being servers for friends, family, and web apps is networking. It's not feasible for everyone to obtain a static IP4 address, configure a firewall, get a domain for it, set DNS records, and roll SSL certificates.

Early Shockwallet/Lightning.Page provided a glimpse of the future with this, by using GUN and a socket event relays.

• Lightning Labs later duplicated this model for Terminal, via LNC/Aperature relays, which unfortunately entangles it with node-level macaroons and will be hard to add handlers for other node implementations.

• Browser extensions that mediate the SSL issue for Web Apps add an extra installation step for users, not to mention and the majority of web traffic comes from devices which can't use browser extensions.

• Tor is is an unusable disaster and doesn't work with web browsers, it's also arguably harder to configure than a clearnet reverse-proxy.

• Bolt12 takes the worst parts of Tor and doubles down by changing Lightning standards, which would slow down and bifurcate the network making it far less reliable.

Solution:

GUNs web-relay architecture eventually inspired NOSTR. This much leaner specification allows more flexibility of implementation, and has begun proliferation of identity keys that can be used with like-services.

As such, we are revisiting Lightning.Pub, adding NOSTR based accounts and actions that integrate perfectly with this alternative to networking headaches.

The flexibility of NOSTR relays will also allow Lightning.Pub to forward certain LNURL and REST routes over NOSTR directly (and trustlessly). This hybrid relay can meet users where they are, working with a number of existing tools, apps, services and wallets.

Distributed Custody:

With the common node operator able to provide web services via Pub, we can build wallets that bootstrap off of friends and family nodes.

Imagine if Wallet of Satoshi also connected to YOUR node, then opportunistically used your balance to establish your nodes liquidity without fuss.

To prove out this concept with a new Lightning.Pub, we will also reboot Shockwallet with first-class support for aggregating balances across multiple services, via both LNURL and NOSTR.

The goal here is new users to the network can get an instant WoS style experience, in a decentralized/localized way, all while having and have an easy ramp toward self-custody.

Why:

While relatively simple, we believe these efforts are of crucial importance, particularly now.

Impatience has lead to proliferation of dangerous, dead-end workarounds, and narrative attacks by the banksters and shitcoiners.

If we're to avoid the mistakes of the past, where owners of gold centralized it's custody in exchange for notes, we must provide alternatives to the latest CBDC astroturfing campaign that pushes Federal Reserve Note styled ECash.

Better connectivity to remote nodes should also slow the scourge of mobile nodes, which give Lightning a bad reputation due to their unreliability and effectively give custody of your coin to Google and Apple.

Status:

Over the past several days we have begun to upgrade our base code for Lightning.Pub in preparation for this effort, starting with NOSTR integration, which is slated for this week.

UX design for Shockwallet has is a WIP, and can be viewed on UXPin: https://preview.uxpin.com/ae6e6372ab26cd13438d486d4d1ac9d184ec8e82#/pages//simulate/sitemap?mode=i

As stated before, we are a lean team and welcome collaboration. In particular, we could use a React wizard to implement the design, which we'd like to make available both as a PWA and Ionic App. Design/messaging/documentation help would be wonderful too.

You can otherwise follow progress on Github https://github.com/shocknet or chat with us on Telegram https://t.me/ShockBTC, you're also free to argue with us on Twitter https://twitter.com/ShockBTC :)

To the moon!