Author: Antoine Riard 2021-02-12 13:29:11
Published on: 2021-02-12T13:29:11+00:00
In this email exchange, Antoine proposes a variation of bidirectional upfront payments to address the limitations of the previous system. The new system uses a time-proportional hold fee rate that binds the hold fee to the effectively consumed timelocked period of the liquidity rather than its potential maximum. Routing nodes advertise their 'hold_grace_period' and are willing to pay hold fees for HTLC forwarding if they added a delay greater than the grace period. If the sender is also a routing node, they should expect the node before them to cover the costs. However, there are concerns about HTLC settlement differences due to clock discrepancies or incoming counterparties going offline, which could lead to routing nodes being at a loss. Despite these concerns, Antoine believes that the proposal adds the necessary flexibility to not take a step back in terms of functionality and simplifies the parameter set. He also mentions that Stake Certificates could be a better solution for long-term network economics by not adding a new fee burden on payments. Joost raises an issue with using feerates instead of fixed fees, but Antoine argues that the risk is bound in both cases and that capping the variable fee at a level that isn't considered risky would not fully cover the actual cost of the locked-up HTLC.
Updated on: 2023-06-03T03:41:40.383840+00:00