Published on: 2015-07-18T11:10:01+00:00
Routing in the Lightning Network (LN) is a crucial aspect to counter censorship based on destination address. Rusty Russell suggests that source routing is the most favorable option due to its privacy benefits and ability to strike a balance between reliability and price. To implement source routing, Rusty proposes the concept of connecting to a subset of hubs, which would enable easy discovery routing within the network. In this scenario, users would report their address as "client XXXXX via hub." However, a more ambitious idea involves selecting a limited number of "beacons" based on the block hash, allowing every node to determine the most efficient routes to and from these beacons. Nonetheless, this approach may pose challenges such as potential overload on the beacons and their neighboring nodes.The anchor transactions in the blockchain provide valuable insight into the network topology. Although it is an interesting concept, scalability and defense against denial-of-service (DoS) attacks remain uncertain. Despite these concerns, the desire to maintain a free network drives the exploration of this idea.In discussions regarding LN routing, Rusty outlines several assumptions. Firstly, each node is identified by its pubkey. Secondly, the use of source routing is preferred due to its privacy advantages and better trade-offs between reliability and cost. Thirdly, onion routing is recommended, where each node knows the source and next step. However, this method has limitations, such as R values potentially revealing connections and timeouts indicating minimum time-to-live (TTL). To facilitate routing, recipients are expected to provide payers with 100 routes from various nodes to themselves. Payers can then select the most suitable route, likely choosing the cheapest option. This approach also ensures that a route query by the payer does not easily disclose the recipient's identity.To address the issue of fees in Bitcoin transactions, micro-transaction infrastructure could enable instant per-transaction payment of fees. However, this raises questions about whether nodes will forward payments at a net loss and how fee differences could affect routing decisions. To incentivize people to bring channels back to equilibrium, the author suggests increasing fees in one direction and decreasing them in the opposite direction. Negative fees could even be offered for transactions that bring a channel back to equilibrium, creating a market for people to make money from bringing other channels back to equilibrium. However, this would require stepping away from "net neutrality" or explicitly setting fees for intermediate nodes.Overall, routing in LN presents challenges and opportunities. By leveraging the anchor transactions in the blockchain and considering different routing approaches, the network aims to achieve efficient and censorship-resistant transfers while prioritizing privacy and cost-effectiveness. The proposal for an onion routing system and the idea of incentivizing channel equilibrium through fees offer potential solutions to these challenges. However, further research and development are needed to refine and implement these concepts effectively.
Updated on: 2023-07-31T18:05:36.932159+00:00