When I was in SF I met with Elizabeth, Joseph and Olaoluwa from Lightning. They’re considering using both ICANN names and Blockstack names for Venmo-like payments over Lightning.
Here are a few takeaways from our discussion:
- They would like to allow users to register names directly from the lightning command line interface (lnd).
- They would prefer to have a single “wrapper” root-TLD for all Blockstack TLDs. This could take the form of something like
.stackbut then we’d need to ensure that ICANN doesn’t overlap with this TLD. Joseph Poon recommends a one-letter root-TLD, though, because then we can be certain that ICANN won’t create a TLD that collides. Here are some examples:.bor.aor.xor.0. You could then make a payment to Naval Ravikant by either entering his domain name (startupboy.com) or his Blockstack ID (naval.id.x). - With lightning, it’s ok from a privacy perspective to publicly tie usernames to public keys. That’s because transactions don’t hit the blockchain, so there is no concern of public transaction correlation. This could enable a real workable “pay to username” system on bitcoin for the first time ever. It’ll be instant and private and convenient, just like Venmo but decentralized.