A new usage for Lightning was proposed by Tyler H under the name Atlas.

It is a distributed, peer to peer mapping storage and retrieval system for advertising human meaningful data.

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.

Following the discussion that happened around tyzbit’s proposal on advertising lightning nodes via DNS records, he followed up with a proposal that aims to provide human readable, secure and decentralized “names” and arbitrary data on the blockchain while solving Zook’s DCS triangle

I have been working on a proposal called Numerifides which would provide a general method to register human-readable names and arbitrary data (such as username->GPG key, domain->IP address, Lightning node Alias-> URI, etc).

Here are the key highlights:

• New transaction type called “numerifides” transactions
• Lock up Bitcoin for a certain amount of time to make the mappings valid, discourage “namesquatting”
• Transaction puzzle attached to transactions to allow community consensus revocation of highly contested names or “squatted” name mappings.
• Transactions are RBF so if name is contentious or miners wish to censor, one honest greedy miner can include the censored user’s high-fee transaction)
• Solves Zooko’s triangle of Secure, Decentralized and Human Meaningful