So how excited should I be while it still appears to be in the concept phase? Is it one of those "if it sounds too good to be true... etc" deals?
You should be fairly excited. The proposal comes from Laolu, one of the primary architects of the Lightning Network and main developer of LND. While perhaps the proposal as it was exactly written in the email won't happen, I'm sure that something very similar to it will be created and implemented.Has anyone identified any pitfalls or shortcomings yet? Or is it simply too early to tell?
There is active discussion about this on the mailing list (I haven't really been following), and it is still in the concept phase so expect the proposal to change and the issues worked out over time. I would like to disagree with you but I found in the past that the "Ban" button comes in to play so best not to say anything
that might upset the moderator.
we repurpose some unused space in the onion per-hop payload of the
onion blob to signal our protocol (and deliver some protocol-specific data),
then use additive secret sharing to ensure that the receiver can't pull the
payment until they have enough shares to reconstruct the original pre-image.
