Author: CJP 2015-07-14 18:54:44
Published on: 2015-07-14T18:54:44+00:00
The issue of fees is a major concern in transactions. Without source routing, clients are left guessing the amount of fees to pay, leading to gaming and a poor model for privacy. However, with source routing and onion, it's possible to explicitly state what each hop gets. There's still a risk of losing if the payment information is out of date. The author compares fees to internet bills, where ISPs average out all costs and present it as a fraction to each customer. However, micro-transaction infrastructures make instant per-transaction payments of transaction fees possible. Nodes might be prepared to forward payments at a net loss if they can compensate losses with higher profits on other transactions. Fee differences could also play a role in routing decisions. Fees could incentivize people to bring channels back to equilibrium by increasing fees in one direction and decreasing fees in the opposite direction. Negative fees could be offered for transactions that bring a channel back to equilibrium. This would require stepping away from net neutrality or setting explicit fees for intermediate nodes.The author's "neutral meeting point" routing design creates two routable addresses, one for negative-fee interface and one for all other interfaces. A person can perform a payment-to-self with payee-side routing to the negative-fee interface and payer-side routing to all other interfaces. Payee-side can have a larger payment amount than payer-side, as agreed with the meeting point, to transfer a part of the profit to the person performing the transaction.
Updated on: 2023-05-23T18:09:28.139684+00:00