today i saw a new development in the lightning space: https://lightningaddress.com/

tldr: send sats to the known email address format

it is a combination of lnurl and a http server. some people who use letsencrypt might know the .well-known/acme-challenge endpoint to get certificates for your website. lightningaddress uses the .well-known/lnurlp/username endpoint to generate lnurl invoices

i am looking forward to provide such functionality to my friends and family - this is exciting. what do you think?

i am a little bit afraid that it will be centralised like email is today, that is why running your own lightning node seems a good thing to do

since some days/weeks now i am diving into the lightning network. i opened my first channel with rath (we did it with the experimental dual-funding option in c-lightning, which worked flawlessly), consuming a lot of information around the topic, it feels like falling down the rabbit hole once again (after falling down the bitcoin rabbit hole). i am running a mailserver for my family and friends since some years now and would like to provide the same in the future with my bitcoin lightning node (a mostly independent way to transfer value). i assume that most people won't run a lightning node, you may see the parallel to running your own mailserver, most people don't and they use microsoft or google for that

today i had this idea how i could give access to friends and family to my node. what if they install the latest new shiny lightning app on their smartphones (with the ability to open channels - not acinq/bluewallet and the others) and then open private channels to my node. that would mean they can profit from my "position" in the network, but don't need to be online. then setting the fees for the private channels to zero (or one could charge for the service, by setting fees on these private channels). maybe this is what acinq is doing or bluewallet with their lndhub?

some things i am thinking about:

1. how can i make sure that these channels never get closed? is there something to "lock" channels, something like: never close this
2. maybe there is a better solution, cause with this setup, every person would still need to do one transaction on the base layer (which isn't that bad - i don't have that many friends and family members anyway  )
3. is this even something that i need to solve or is there a solution in front of my nose i didn't think about?

what are your thoughts? this is just something that came up today and i wanted to share it, maybe it is stupid, i am happy to discuss it  keep in mind i am running c-lightning, lndhub is for lnd only i think, that is why i didn't look deeper into it - but maybe i can take some concepts form them