Author: Benjamin Mord 2018-04-13 16:13:18
Published on: 2018-04-13T16:13:18+00:00
In an email exchange between Benjamin Mord and ZmnSCPxj, they discuss the importance of considering short and long-term goals when building systems. Mord expresses skepticism towards discrete logarithm's long-term security and views scriptless scripts as being dangerously seductive. Despite this, he suggests that it is worth assuming that we will eventually want and need alternative methods of achieving AMP in order to think strategically about how fee dynamics can improve efficiency over time. The conversation then shifts to a discussion on the economic efficiency of Lightning operation and the critical nature of pricing as a signaling mechanism that impacts channel lifetime. They also touch on the power law assumption of transaction size distribution and the more general approach to estimating channel lifespan. Mord proposes adding an optional exponential component to permit a price exponent which may be set higher than 1. The cost to channel operator of processing a transaction is largely the impact to expected channel lifespan, which in turn is nonlinear with respect to transaction size - and dramatically so as transaction size approaches (or exceeds) remaining capacity.ZmnSCPxj responds by noting that larger payments have a much lower chance of successfully propagating through the network and that adding a nonlinear component would be difficult to add on to the protocol currently. However, if combined with the proposed AMP proposal, economic efficiency could be greatly improved. ZmnSCPxj notes that his AMP proposal cannot work soon, but requires Bellare-Neven/MuSig/Schnorr signatures to be added to Bitcoin to get HD+SS. Then all implementations must switch over to using scriptless script contingent payments rather than hashlocked contingent payments, which requires convincing all network node operators to upgrade.The conversation ends with a discussion on whether channels should have the option of publicizing their balances to improve routing performance and scalability in a large network, and for competitive differentiation among competing routes. ZmnSCPxj suggests that it is possible to hint the suitability of a channel for routing in a particular direction, without completely leaking the balance in detail, by adjusting the on-Lightning `fee_base_msat` and `fee_proportional_millionths` of channels.
Updated on: 2023-05-24T22:04:42.308879+00:00