Rusty Russell on Nostr: I'm working on a new pay plugin called xpay (working title). It's designed to use the ...

I'm working on a new pay plugin called xpay (working title). It's designed to use the new (very WIP) askrene plugin, which provides routes. Actually, most of the work is there, fixing and enhancing that. Especially diagnosis: *why* did it give a weird/no route? Common issues are: there's a good channel but it's offline, or doesn't have capacity, or you don't have enough capacity at all, or the recipient doesn't. We've had issues where gossip is missing, too: detecting when that happens is an open research question, but we'll start probing more aggressively.

There have been many complaints about pay in the wild, and the code has grown quite complex. I've heard good things about Boltz's mpay, which is far simpler, so I'm inspired to go in that direction. Moving the routing (which *is* complex!) out is the first step.

To be honest, I should have taken a direct interest in this earlier. I considered pay a simple problem, or at least not one I needed to concern myself with. But better late than never!