4
Bitcoin uses a DNS-based bootstrapping mechanism to help new nodes find peers. As far as I'm aware, Lightning doesn't have such mechanism, and new users are supposed to just search for node addresses on the web (or use nodes maintained / recommended by their wallet developers, or whatever).
What is the rationale behind this design decision?
Nice, thanks! So the logical continuation of my question would then be - why isn't it used as the default connection mechanism, as in Bitcoin? (Or is it? I'm experimenting with Eclair and it I don't see that option; do c-lightning or LND have it?) – Sergei Tikhomirov – 2019-06-11T13:32:38.953
That I don't know :( When you use my autopilot plugin it is being used. I guess in lightning the process is different. You only peer with a node when you want to create a channel anyway. So I guess the indirect answer is that the power of choice was left to the user – Rene Pickhardt – 2019-06-11T13:42:37.307
Got it! The last thing I don't quite understand is how to specify the DNS query to get a testnet node. BOLT10 says that the "realm byte"
– Sergei Tikhomirov – 2019-06-11T14:02:33.013ris "used to specify what realm the returned nodes must support" with the default value of "0 (Bitcoin)", but it doesn't mention the values for other networks...