What is the state of this project? I consider this or anything like this the most important improvement since Bitcoin itself as I would expect from it:
- instant payment solved once and for all
- truly free-ish transactions (for a long time to come: if 8billion people want to participate with just one one-year-channel each, we would still have to process 300k transactions per block)
- arbitrarily small payments (down to 1 Satoshi until we introduce more decimals)
- increased anonymity (if done as described here and not with just a small set of entities providing nodes like email providers)
- closely related: an end to services actually holding users' money with all the risks that brings with it
As the server/node part of this should be completely trust free, it could even be run by a company closed source with huge profit potential as currently every bitcoin transaction is worth $0.08US.
With the network you mentioned on IRC (I did read the logs) or even a decentralized node with intermediaries which forward funds, I think that would mean the intermediary nodes would need to register under the clarified FinCEN rules in the US. Since I live in the US, that would preclude me from being able to run a node such as this anywhere but on testnet. However, as I understand it, this wouldn't prevent US residents from using such a network through intermediary nodes based in another jurisdiction.
I find this concern rather funny. One although not the only reason to give money transmitter high scrutiny is to protect users from the money transmitters spending their money. Paypal is holding gigantic amounts of money at any given moment. The point of the proposed tools here is to remove that trust completely so I would consider it worth arguing if you are a money transmitter by these laws at all. Sprint and AT&T also transmit banking messages via their networks and they also charge for transmitting these messages.
The other point is that the project proposed here is meant to be available to everybody as open source (right?) although a trust free node could be used even if only the client was open source. How will FinCEN possibly police all the kids that aptitude install a payment node to "mine" some mɃ?