Hi, Edward! Welcome to the mailing list :)
The fees can indeed be set for each direction of the channel, check out
https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lightning-rfc/blob/master/07-routing-gossip.md#the-channel_update-message
[https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lightning-rfc/blob/master/07-routing-gossip.md#the-channel_update-message]
Basically each node in the channel can announce the fee til will take to route
a payment in the direction leading “away” from it. We also have something
called “channel reserves” ensuring that each node always has some balance at
stake in case an old state is broadcast.
Cheers! Johan
On Wed, Dec 6, 2017 at 12:04, Edziu Marynarz <edziumaryn...@gmail.com> wrote:
I tried to find this information in the BOLT documents but I couldn't find it.
Is it possible to set up the channel so that the fee depends on the direction,
i.e. a different fee on the receive direction and different on the send one?
Why such functionality?
Imagine that you start with a bidirectional channel to Alice and a channel to
Bob with 1000 satoshi each. For some reasons, the network routes most of the
transactions from Alice to you and then to Bob and you end up with 1900 satoshi
in the Alice channel and only 100 satoshi in the Bob one. The route will stop
working and if there is little traffic in the other direction you will have to
close the channels to rebalance them or wait a very long time for the
rebalancing.
If the fee could depend on the direction, one could start to ramp up fees on
the receiving end of the channel that is getting large and lower the one that
is empty to prevent the imbalance.
There is also a risk factor involved. The lightning network channels get
riskier on the receive side the more the channel value deviates from the
original state since the counterparty may try to broadcast the old state so you
may want to regulate this imbalance with fees. It would be best if the LN
applications could do it automatically.
Regards,
Edward
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