Mitigating Channel Jamming with Reputation Credentials: a Protocol Sketch

Summary:

Antoine has proposed a new mitigation proposal for channel congestion in the Lightning Network. The proposal aims to solve channel jamming by using "credentials" issued by routing hops and attached to each HTLC forward request. These credentials can be used by a reputation algorithm to reward/punish payment senders and allocate channel liquidity resources efficiently. The initial distribution of credentials can be bootstrapped leveraging one-time upfront fees paid toward the routing hops.The proposal is built on previous reputation-scheme research and integrates the more recent proposals of upfront fees as a straightforward mechanism to bootstrap the reputation system. The proposed reputation-based scheme is aimed at solving channel jamming and allows active HTLC traffic-shaping, where a routing hop can allow extended channel liquidity lockups based on accumulated reputation.The proposal also addresses several questions raised by Clara Shikhelman regarding the transferability of tokens between users, recommended policies for the creation and use of tokens, the possibility of a secondary market, and how these tokens work with blinded paths and other privacy-preserving suggestions. The proposal suggests that the tokens can be transferred between users, and there might be a secondary market. The proposal also suggests enforcing proportionality between token acquisition costs and available channels liquidity.The framework should be flexible enough for the credentials to be harvested by LSPs and then distributed in a secondary fashion to their spokes transparently. The mitigation is effective, incentive-compatible, made transparent from the user, and conserves high-level privacy using blinded signature. Although few protocol messages need to be modified, routing algorithms adaptations might be more serious. There could be a concern about the centralization inertia introduced by a reputation system.On the ecosystem impacts, future LN protocol upgrades shouldn't be significantly restrained. Each routing node has oversight on its routing policy, acquisition methods, credentials to liquidity rate. Feedback is welcome. Overall, this proposal could benefit the Lightning Network by improving its efficiency and preventing channel jamming.

Updated on: 2023-06-03T10:47:52.691174+00:00