Author: fiatjaf 2019-08-09 02:35:41
Published on: 2019-08-09T02:35:41+00:00
Trampoline routing is a conceptually simple way to send payments in Bitcoin's Lightning Network. It allows users to defer route calculation to trampoline nodes, which are essentially highly connected nodes that can reach other parts of the network where the sender cannot. The onion routing part is straightforward thanks to variable-length onion payloads. Trampoline routing could help improve routing overall in larger networks by caching routes for future use. However, there remain questions regarding the feasibility of returning calculated routes to the original caller and whether trampoline nodes would be interested in cheating or not returning any route at all. To specify their fees and cltv requirements, trampoline nodes need to estimate the fee and cltv that allows them to route to almost any other trampoline node. To sync remote trampoline nodes' fees and cltv requirements, existing gossip infrastructure can be used to exchange a new node_update message. Alice, the sender, sends gossip filters to her peers to receive only updates that match these filters. Peers can refuse to serve filters if they are too expensive to compute, but the filters proposed in the PR are very cheap. Feedback on the concept itself, as well as on the gossip and fee estimation parts, is welcomed.
Updated on: 2023-06-02T19:44:32.689666+00:00