Author: Cezary Dziemian 2020-02-10 17:53:16
Published on: 2020-02-10T17:53:16+00:00
In this email thread, a user named Cezary is seeking clarification about the Lightning Network protocol. René Pickhardt responds to Cezary's questions, suggesting that he direct questions about understanding the protocol to bitcoin.stackexchange.com since this mailing list is more devoted towards driving the development of the protocol. In response to Cezary's first question, René explains that payees will only release the preimage for an invoice if they are satisfied with the amount specified in the invoice. For keysend, where the payee does not expect an amount, the payee will most likely release the preimage as they would consider it to be free money. Regarding Cezary's second question, René explains that onions are always of constant size and additional data is added to the end of onion encrypted list of HTLCs in order to prevent the last hub from guessing that it is the last hub in the route. In response to Cezary's third question, René explains that HTLCs are additional outputs in the commitment transaction and the protocol allows for up to 483 HTLCs concurrently in flight. However, the standard of implementations and recommendation is 30. This means that a single payment is not freezing the channel, but it "locks" the amount of that payment until settlement, which cannot be used by either party of the channel for other payments or activities.
Updated on: 2023-06-02T23:35:41.936546+00:00