Author: Jim Posen 2018-05-15 18:43:07
Published on: 2018-05-15T18:43:07+00:00
The discussion revolves around the misalignment of user and node incentives in a decentralized system, which can lead to nodes exploiting failure cases for profit. One proposal is to introduce an unconditional spam fee to punish senders who send failing payments and put load on the network. However, this could sacrifice privacy and create new vectors for deanonymizing the network. The reputation system is suggested as a means of protecting routers against DoS attacks. Each node has a local configuration of its "reputation loss rate" per channel, and each update_add_htlc has an additional field "reputation loss rate". A reputation score is kept for each peer node, and when a payment completes, the fees collected are added to their reputation score. When forwarding an HTLC, the upstream hop measures the elapsed time between delivery of a commitment signature on the add and receipt of the fail/update. If a peer's reputation score is sufficient, their HTLC is forwarded and a hold is placed on their total reputation for that amount. Reputation is not explicitly shared between peered nodes. Ultimately, it is argued that the tradeoff between network efficiency and privacy needs to be carefully evaluated.
Updated on: 2023-05-25T00:46:18.222483+00:00