Author: Andrea RASPITZU 2019-03-13 17:06:17
Published on: 2019-03-13T17:06:17+00:00
A discussion between Andrea and John-John regarding the current fee structure of the Lightning Network was shared on the mailing list. The current version of the spec uses source routing, which attaches fees to payments when sent out. If there is an incorrect amount of fees for a channel, an intermediate node responds with a channel_update message containing the actual fees. John-John believes that there is no inherent way to incentivize balanced channels and suggests a proposal to balance channels. He proposes a scheme of brackets where each satoshi in a channel has a different price for each satoshi moved. Channels would then broadcast a cost function instead of the fixed fee. From the cost function, the fee may be retrieved by calculating the area under the graphs. This method would incentivize payments to route in such a way as to keep channels balanced, leading to higher throughput. However, this method may be unnecessarily complex and would require deterministic ways to calculate integrals over multiple systems. Despite the potential headaches associated with this approach, some small tweaks in the protocol could lead to a much healthier network worth exploring.
Updated on: 2023-06-02T17:57:57.040493+00:00