Greetings again, list. I have an idea that may be an excellent use-case for Lightning. Where Numerifides was an attempt at decentralized identity rooted to the Blockchain, I thought of a new system that uses Lightning itself that seems superior, and perhaps gives Lightning even more utility than it currently has.
The long and short of it is: I propose adding a feature (along with an RFC and a feature bit) to Lightning whereby any given node can be queried for a mapping (such as "Give me the IP address for Google.com" and the node can provide any answer one chooses _along with fulfilling a Lightning payment request the client provides_. The thinking here is nobody is willing to pay for mappings unless they're important, so mappings such as the pubkey associated with an unpopular username will only get paid by the person who has the username, or not paid at all, and thus the result can safely be disregarded. Longer paths or more queries will cost the claimant more, plus it will cost for each query of the mapping. Paying 1 satoshi (or less ;] ) per query for decentralized, trusted hosting of your data mappings seems fair. This is also aided by the fact that you cannot pay out on a channel without already having a channel _with outbound liquidity_. So someone cannot, say, open a channel to a random node and spam queries as the directionality simply won't allow it. Lastly on the topic, the database could be shared among nodes for a price, where a Lightning node can offer to store data per hour and the person who wishes for redundancy can pay a Lightning invoice and provide the data. This data wouldn't have to be encrypted or private, since the whole point is that it can be queried publicly. You could even check if they're honest by querying them and seeing if they pay you Bitcoin back. I think if nothing else, this would be a good spare functionality used for rebalancing channels, if only to add some utility. Looking way far into the future, you could also submit queries like "What's the best place to get a burger in San Francisco" and only the real die-hard fans (and companies with some Bitcoin to burn for "advertising") would be willing to pay for their opinion to be heard. Feedback appreciated, Tyler
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