Is there some way to add a third party authorizer to (or by) a lightning network transaction?

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I'm not asking for "multisig on the lightning network", but I'm more curious about how one would set up shared control over lightning network transactions in general.

Imagine we don't have a multisig transaction... would it be possible to set up some sort of 3rd party oracle that would "link" a channel?

Or maybe set up some sort of logic implemented by the opening or closing of payment channels on a boutique lightning network?

In 2.2 of the lightning network paper, it says that opening payment channels doesn't actually control the movement of any funds. https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf

Some folks came up with an idea for a way to pay an oracle for provable information (especially information that can best be obtained in from a lot of different decentralized nodes at "anti-affinitied" locations) using lightning & bcoin: https://github.com/michaelfolkson/bcoin-hackathon

My brother wrote an implementation of NAND gates here, https://github.com/rjb25/gate-wiring , and since considering both of these I wondered whether one might hook up some sort of gating system whereby a third party could make a decision about two possibilities for distribution of the funds of another two parties.

And now I'm wondering if it'd be possible to set up some sort of private lightning network that uses the opening and closing of payment channels (or resizing them) to do some kind of third party authorization logic for lightning payments?

Perhaps where one person (party A) receives some amount of bitcoin in one case, and another (party B) in a different case, as determined by a third party oracle or mod?

Nathan Basanese

Posted 2017-03-27T20:49:11.657

Reputation: 303

Is there any particular reason why you are typing // everywhere? It doesn't do anything as far as I know.Nate Eldredge 2017-03-27T21:08:04.983

@NateEldredge: I was just editing the same post for the same reason.— Nathan Basanese: please stop doing this. While it may give your posts some additional attention for a moment due to the visual clutter, you're creating unnecessary work for other users.Murch 2017-03-27T21:17:14.993

// , :) I guess not everyone on here can be expected to have a sense of humor about such thingsNathan Basanese 2017-03-28T18:23:06.770

// , Do you have any comments about the question itself, or just style guides? I think some stackexchange fora have style guides. Would you link me to the one for bitcoin.stackexchange.com?Nathan Basanese 2017-03-28T18:28:03.307

@NathanBasanese Honestly, I can't tell what you're asking. e.g. [..] came up with an idea for a way to pay an oracle [..] using lightning & bcoin What information are we paying for? Why do we trust this oracle to provide it? My brother wrote an implementation of NAND gates here That's cool, but what relationship does this have to the rest of the question? You're asking for something that is explicitly not multisig, but it sounds like multisig makes the most sense for your use case.Nick ODell 2017-03-28T18:51:36.800

// , Ah, yes, good questions. I could probably stand to organize the semantics of this a bit better. I wrote it up while talking to someone about this under the assumption that one would have to set up some sort of NAND gate style of logic using the opening or closing of payment channels. From what I've found out so far since I wrote this, "multisig" is not supported in the same sense as in bitcoin, but the idea of shared control is possible. More to follow.Nathan Basanese 2017-03-28T19:52:31.153

Answers

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I think you ask about escrow services in lightning. Generally there is a good opportunity to work with preimages. For example if we would move away from sha256 and would use ecdsa public private key encryption or a homomorphic hash function. Several parties could collaborative create a payment hash Wo sich they could only together generate the preimage. Stuff like this would also be possible with scriptless scripts. Also multiparty channels and channel factories could yield such functionality. So yes generally it is possible with lightning to go down this road but currently nothing of that is implemented to the protocol.

Rene Pickhardt

Posted 2017-03-27T20:49:11.657

Reputation: 6 565

// , What, pray tell, is a "scriptless script"? (I'm reading up on it now, btw: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=scriptless+script)

Nathan Basanese 2019-04-26T22:44:15.530

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I asked @roasbeef last night, and he mentioned that Lightning may soon support multicontrol payments.

I'll add more details once I do some reading on the mailing list.

Nathan Basanese

Posted 2017-03-27T20:49:11.657

Reputation: 303