Author: lisa neigut 2022-09-23 20:13:53
Published on: 2022-09-23T20:13:53+00:00
The discussion revolves around the use of rate cards in Lightning Network and its impact on privacy, scalability, and network capacity. The author argues that failed payment attempts can be indistinguishable from data collection probing, and it is not realistic to expect payments to stop failing while prioritizing privacy of channel balances. They propose the use of payment bands to strike a balance between "probe-ability" and some obfuscation of balance while reducing bandwidth consumption required for payment success. The author also suggests investigating Rene Pickhardt's proposal for sharing channel balances with directly connected peers, which is less private, less costly, more granular, and has a smaller scope. Negative fees are expected to make channel balance data a competitive advantage and encourage node operators to guard their balances closely, reducing the current trend of sharing information with centralized parties. Regarding the concern about centralized entities performing data collection, the author believes that the present protocol design already incentivizes centralized efforts to collect exact balance data. Moving to rate cards has the potential to reduce this incentive or, at the very least, not make it worse than the current situation. The proposed change may also encourage operators to set their htlc_maximum_msat higher, given the direct financial cost tied to larger channel bandwidth consumption. The author addresses questions raised by David A. Harding regarding pathfinding algorithms, unscalable data collection, and the try-and-try-again approach. They believe that a more idealized system would have forwarding failures only rarely, so high-frequency spenders wouldn't receive much more information than low-frequency spenders. However, rate cards feel like a small step in the wrong direction towards centralized dependency.
Updated on: 2023-06-03T09:46:51.481091+00:00