Author: Jim Posen 2018-02-07 08:36:35
Published on: 2018-02-07T08:36:35+00:00
The Atomic Multi-path Payments (AMP) scheme is a new feature that can be experimented with on Lightning network today. It requires no fundamental changes to the protocol as it's strictly end-to-end between sender and receiver. Potential benefits of AMP include reducing the effectiveness of static analysis techniques involving channel capacities and forwarded plaintext values, and increasing the set of possible paths a partial payment could have taken. However, it may also be more expensive compared to using a single flow due to per-hop fees. The current proposal allows the paths of partial payments to overlap, and at the end of the day, users can always fall back to regular payment if they expect to end up paying more fees using an AMP.In order to include the three tuple within the per-hop payload for the final destination, the first byte of the un-used padding bytes in the payload is repurposed to signal version 0x01 of the AMP protocol. The `realm` byte controls the interpretation of the rest of the 65-byte packet and if a separate `realm` is defined for the destination node, the entire 64 bytes of the final hop data can be redefined for the new AMP `realm`, reducing route length by one. If supporting AMP only at final payees, the 53 free bytes before the EOBs can be used to signal more advanced protocols to the final destination.At Scaling Bitcoin Stanford, Aviv Zohar gave a talk titled "How to Charge Lightning" where authors analyzed the possible evolution of fees on the network. They suggested adding a super-linear component to extend the lifetime of channels and proposed modifications to the fee schedule. However, the talk itself focused on a very simple "mega super duper hub" topology. Towards the end, he alluded to a forthcoming paper that had more comprehensive analysis of more complex topologies.
Updated on: 2023-05-24T20:52:28.387870+00:00