LN Sphinx streamable money?

[thecodebear]

I read a few days ago an article talking about a new feature of LN called Sphinx that allows streamable money because you don't need to create a invoice on the LN.


I know the basics of LN but I'm wondering if someone can explain what this means a bit more clearly and how it works, how it can work without invoices and what the use cases for streamable money would be?

Aren't the invoices the things your LN node stores to keep track of how much money you have on there? How is it possible that you can send money without them then?

Description or links to good sources would be appreciated! I had never heard about this feature of LN until I saw the article so I'm curious as to how it works and what use cases that could open up. Thanks!

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[Rath_]

There aren't many articles on Sphinx since the commit was created 4 days ago. Lightning Network invoices contain a lot of important information which is required for sending a payment (destination, payment hash, number of satoshis, expiry, timestamp and cltv expiry). In Spinx, invoices are replaced with the EOB which allows to encode extra data for the receiver. That is what I managed to conclude from the available information. Please, correct me if I am wrong. I will continue my research tomorrow.

[Pmalek]

There really isn't much info about it yet. A few articles mention the same things you probably found as well. Although it already works on the mainnet if both sides upgraded to it they are saying that it is still "a work in progress" and is still buggy. 

Here is another source mentioning it briefly.
https://medium.com/chainrift-research/invoiceless-lightning-payments-with-sphinx-ce14af83cb8c