Why should funders always pay on-chain fees?



Summary:

In a Lightning-dev mailing list, Bastien Teinturier suggested that the rule of "funder pays all the commit tx fees" exists solely for simplicity, which may lead to a web-of-trust network where channels would only exist between peers that trust each other. He proposes that in some cases, fundees should pay a portion of the commit-tx on-chain fees to distribute the worst-case cost of needing to go to chain with a "fully loaded" commitment transaction more fairly. He suggests two proposals: deducting the HTLC cost from the offerer's main output and tying the total commit-tx fee to the channel usage. The latter proposal uses the on-chain fee as collateral for channel usage and forces the fundee to care about on-chain feerates, creating a feedback loop between on-chain feerates and routing fees, which is a good long-term thing.


Updated on: 2023-05-23T14:33:14.395830+00:00