Author: Rusty Russell 2015-09-24 20:56:55
Published on: 2015-09-24T20:56:55+00:00
The Lightning Network uses a routing protocol to update fees. The updates occur through the dijkstra-routing-gossip protocol, and the traffic generated is proportional to the number of channels, nodes, and channel fee updates per day. Payment information has to be provided by the payee shortly before the transaction to ensure that the route and fee information is up-to-date. The network will establish channels with new beacons, and beacons may want to bring offline funds online to handle the anticipated capacity. To become a beacon, one needs to use the same key anchor tx to sign a message linking the node ID to the tx. The network might require an artificial delay before using the beacon to avoid saturation. If someone can observe a private conversation between two parties and control enough nodes, they are likely to be the beacon they choose, and there is no need to be a beacon to block them. Without beacons, Bob could anonymously post prices and R values in public, and Alice could observe them anonymously without giving away that she was observing them. Finally, the Lightning Network uses hosted wallets or something like SPV clients, where you're relying on the network to do most of the work working out a cheap route, rather than verifying txns.
Updated on: 2023-05-23T20:14:05.967068+00:00