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renepickhardt / The-Lightning-Network-Book

An open source and crowdfunded book about Bitcoins Lightning Network to scale blockchain technologies.
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who's the target audience for this book? #15

Open Roasbeef opened 5 years ago

Roasbeef commented 5 years ago

Question in issue title. I looked at the draft, and it doesn't seem very focused. It covers basic things within Bitcoin, and then attempts to jump straight from that to more advanced topics, many of which are still in flux and under-researched.

renepickhardt commented 5 years ago

As stated in the introduction I try to target two kind of people:

  1. Developers who want to learn about the Lightning Network in order to use it in their everyday live.
  2. Bitcoin Enthusiasts who are just keen about this new technology.

I believe that developers want to comprehend the principles behind a technology as well as some design decisions and have more background than just the API documentation. On the other side they probably don't need to understand every part of the BOLTs. Currently stuff like that can only be found distributed over the Web but not a single point. As the lightning network is still progressing stuff on the web is already often outdated. The goal of this effort is to fill this void.

I agree with you that the current structure is far from being ready and seems unstructured. Writing a book is obviously an iterative process. Also when you look at the current structure one might get a feeling that the advanced topics will cover a lot of space. However I don't think this will actually be the case. In my mind those advanced topics in chapter 5 should take only about 10% of the pages. There I would tackle them on a high level for those people who might be interested to dig deeper and become a protocol developer. This is currently not reflected when looking at the table of content.

My goal is to explain and motivate the necessity of the core components of the protocol as stated in chapter 3. I believe most parts of what I intent to explain in chapter 3 are pretty stable (even though we still work on the BOLTs). The only topic where I actually fear that we might see heavy changes are the RSMCs when exchanged to Eltoo. However I think in a book like this it is not even bad to explain two different constructions for a payment channel. Then I intend to give a practical guide in Chapter 4. Also for this I would hope that at the time of finishing the book the APIs of the implementations should be somewhat stable. Chapter 6 is currently supposed to be more a discussion for all those people who have doubts about this technology. I think it makes sense to also mention the potential pitfalls and downsides with this protocol.

Generally speaking the level of the book should not be as technical as the BOLTs as I understand them to be rather a reference for protocol developers. Although I learnt a lot from the BOLTs I find them hard to read and at some points even boring (which is not meant as a criticism but perfectly fine for an RFC and specification). Also I heard many people complaining about the Whitepaper in the sense that it seems a) not to be accurately reflecting the status of the BOLTs anymore b) hard to comprehend for many people.

To give you a better idea of my intentions you could look at my progress from today (Still work in progress and I am not even satisfied with the result yet) Still I was creating a glossary which is much more comprehensive and extensive than BOLT 0. I think BOLT 0 is an excellent BOLT and the glossary is amazingly helpful. Yet I believe new learners need more information where even a collection of terms will already help a lot.

In any case I will be more than happy to get more specific and constructive criticism from people like you who are obviously leading developers of this technology as you have most insights. However I believe your daily agenda is also heavily packed which why I didn't bother to ask you about this book project yet.

ZmnSCPxj commented 5 years ago

In short, it seems to me, this book attempts to target mostly technical users who are either interested in simple trivia about the protocol, or who might want to upgrade there knowledge beyond that to begin making applications on top of Lightning.