In Episode 7, we chat with Nadav Kohen of Suredbits and discuss payment points as an alternative to HTLCs on the Lightning Network.

In this conversation we cover:

• Payment points (1:55)

• Blog post part 1

• HTLCs (2:00)

• Timelocks (4:16)

• HTLC drawbacks (5:38)

• Payment decorrelation

• Wormhole attack presented in Anonymous Multi-Hop Locks for Blockchain Scalability and Interoperability (6:35)

• Point time lock contracts (PTLCs) (9:50)

• Adaptor signatures on Schnorr

• Proof of payment (13:25)
• Invoiceless transactions (15:05)
• Hashes, pre-images, and HTLC mechanics (16:35)
• Onion analogy (18:55)
• PTLC mechanics (19:30)
• Why don’t we use PTLCs today? (22:15)
• Lightning in Scriptless Scripts posting by Andrew Poelstra March 2017
• Improving proof of payment (26:10)
• Stuckless payments (30:46)
• Spam on Lightning (35:46)
• Selling Signatures and Schnorr signatures off the main chain (36:55)
• Contingent payments (39:20)
• Escrow contracts (41:28)
• Atomic multiparty setup and payment renegotiation (46:02)
• ETA of payment points (48:02)

Thanks as always to Matthew Zipkin for the sound engineering.