Author: Bastien TEINTURIER 2022-07-01 13:02:40
Published on: 2022-07-01T13:02:40+00:00
The discussion is regarding the idea of implementing inbound fees in the Lightning Network. Joost Jager proposed the idea and questioned whether it was fair that routing nodes weren't compensated for accepting incoming HTLCs, as their money gets locked up in a channel that may or may not be interesting to them. Bastien Teinturier replied that this doesn't make sense because the funds on the other side of the channel belong to the peer, and routing nodes are already benefiting from free inbound liquidity if all the funds are on the peer's side. Bastien also stated that allowing routing nodes to set inbound fees would break the routing incentives and lead to unhealthy incentives, such as malicious nodes selectively failing HTLCs. Furthermore, he suggested that the risk of accepting channels from unknown nodes could be addressed by making the opener pay a fee when they open a channel to compensate for that risk.Thomas Huet shared his concern that the proposal would break the current fee structure, which provides incentive to open channels to nodes that receive more than they send. He argued that this incentivizes people to provide liquidity to merchants, thereby making the network more reliable. Joost later corrected a statement about the sum of inbound and outbound fees, stating that path-finding algorithms don't support negative fees, but rounding up to zero is still a quick fix and better than ignoring inbound fees completely.
Updated on: 2023-06-03T09:35:56.631562+00:00