Author: ZmnSCPxj 2018-04-11 09:17:15
Published on: 2018-04-11T09:17:15+00:00
The channel balance of each peer on the network is not revealed by node gossip as it represents the amount of money each peer owns on that channel. Any changes to that balance also represent a send/receive on that channel; therefore, revealing the channel balance and any changes in that balance would lead to a loss of privacy. Real-life implementations like c-lightning get payment routes through brute-force trial-and-error, which is less desirable than getting exact channel balances at each balance update. While probing to discover capacities in each path is possible, the sender risks having its funds locked for some blocks if a node along the route stalls. Additionally, the sender only gets one bit of information to the question: Is the channel balance in this direction greater than X? Lastly, the exact failure TEMPORARY_CHANNEL_FAILURE can signify that the other node is currently down or if there are too many HTLCs in-flight on that channel.
Updated on: 2023-05-24T22:05:14.981309+00:00