Fee Ratecards (your gateway to negativity)



Summary:

The Lightning Network is proposing a ratecard as an alternative to the current fee proportional millionths and fee base msat for forwarding payments. The ratecard would allow channel operators to specify different rates for liquidity that will automatically update based on channel capacity. The motivation behind introducing ratecards is to enable node operators to experiment with negative fees and to allow variable values for channel capacity. Negative fees can be implemented by expressing feerate card bands as negative numbers, allowing node operators to price the available liquidity in their channel at a discount.Payments are then priced differently depending on available capacity in a channel, enabling node operators to express fine-grained prices of their existing capacity with much reduced bandwidth burden. A TLV will be added to the channel_update gossip message, containing a ratecard with four 16-bit signed integers for each quarter of channel capacity. A routing node will then pay based on the guessed channel capacity and payment priority if a node advertises a ratecard in its channel_update. On payment failure, the response is the same as returning a copy of the channel_update in the onion, but the node may give an additional hint about the current acceptable feerate for payment. Payment base fees will no longer be used as they do not work with negative rates.Astute readers may notice that the proposed feerate card bands can be expressed as negative numbers. This allows node operators to price the liquidity available in their channel at a discount.In addition to the proposed ratecard, the context provides a link to a presentation of slides at the Bitcoin Privacy & Security Meetup in Austin. The presenter discusses various topics related to cryptocurrency and blockchain, including the history of Bitcoin, privacy concerns, and possible solutions to improve security. The presentation also covers the mining process and the role of nodes in the network. Additionally, the speaker emphasizes the need for decentralization and community involvement in the development of cryptocurrency technology. Overall, the presentation offers insights into how the cryptocurrency industry is evolving and the challenges it faces in terms of privacy and security.


Updated on: 2023-06-03T09:50:43.012393+00:00