Author: Benjamin Mord 2018-04-11 16:00:47
Published on: 2018-04-11T16:00:47+00:00
The question of whether channels should have the option to publicize their balances for routing performance and scalability in a large network, as well as competitive differentiation among routes, was raised on the Lightning-dev mailing list. However, revealing channel balances would compromise privacy, since each balance represents the amount of money each peer owns on that channel, and each change represents a send or receive. Real-life implementations like c-lightning use brute-force trial-and-error to get payment routes, which means probing to discover the capacities in each path. The sender risks its funds if a node along the route stalls, but only gets one bit of information about whether the channel balance in a particular direction is greater than X. This technique is less desirable than getting exact channel balances at each update, but still provides some information while preserving some privacy.
Updated on: 2023-05-24T22:05:30.247568+00:00