Author: Michael Folkson 2022-06-28 10:26:39
Published on: 2022-06-28T10:26:39+00:00
ZmnSCPxj, a member of the Lightning-dev mailing list, wrote a short write-up on some strategies that Lightning forwarding nodes might utilize. The strategies include passive rebalance, set feerates according to balance, low fee, and wall. The interesting thing is how these three interact. If there were only a single wall node, it can stop rebalancing once the price to rebalance costs more than 49% of its earnings, so it paid 49% of its earnings to the passive rebalancers and keeps 51% of its earnings, thus earning more than the passive rebalancers earn. However, once multiple wall nodes exist, they will start bidding for the available liquidity from the passive rebalancers and may find it difficult to compete. Passive rebalancers would outcompete wall strategies if they were the only strategies on the network. However, the network as-is contains a lot of tiny nodes with low feerates. In such an environment, walls can pick up liquidity for really cheap, leaving the low-feerate nodes with no liquidity in the correct direction. Low feerate nodes are notoriously unreliable for payments because their channels are usually saturated in one side or another since walls keep taking their liquidity. Because of this known unreliability, some payer strategies filter them out via some heuristics. Both low-feerates and walls do not leak their channel balances, whereas passive rebalancers do leak their channel balance. The above is just some thinking of ZmnSCPxj — actual experimentation on models or on actual network nodes might be better than his speculation. Michael Folkson also replied to the thread, suggesting a similar attempt at categorizing the different strategies for a routing/forwarding node by Alex Bosworth in a presentation at the Lightning Hack Day last year.
Updated on: 2023-06-03T09:12:13.287025+00:00