Author: Clara Shikhelman 2021-11-15 18:36:27
Published on: 2021-11-15T18:36:27+00:00
In a discussion on the Lightning-dev mailing list, Joost Jager sought a simple way to offer users a trade-off between routing fee and reliability when selecting payment routes. He proposed a single [0, 1] value that would control the selection process, where at 0 the route is only optimized for fees and probabilities are completely ignored, and at 1 the route is only optimized for reliability and fees are ignored completely. However, he was unsure about how to choose between routes for a value between 0 and 1. In response, Clara suggested normalizing the payment fees to a [0,1] scale using either the cheapest path or 0 sat as 1, and then using a score formula of [image: \alpha\cdot f + (1-\alpha)\cdot p], where alpha is the chosen balance parameter, f is the fee, and p is the success probability. This would allow for a simple formula to decide between routes with a sound probability-theoretical basis.
Updated on: 2023-06-03T06:29:06.156832+00:00