Good morning aj, Rene, and all, So let me discuss a little more about how I model the forwarding nodes.
Forwarding nodes want to maximize profit. Forwarding nodes sell liquidity. If a forwarding node runs out of stock of liquidity (i.e. their channel is unbalanced against the direction a payment request fails) they earn 0 profit. If a forwarding node finds a liquidity being sold at a lower price than they would be able to sell it, they will buy out the cheaper stock and then resell it at a higher price. This is called rebalancing. In particular: * Other economic activity is likely to be "has to happen at a particular time". * The intuition here is that people are not going to pay until they become interested in purchasing a product, and only then will they actually send out an HTLC. * Rebalances (i.e. hostile takeover bids of cheap liquidity) are "can happen at any time". * Thus, rebalances are likely to occur "first", because they can happen at any time, and can be done right now, whereas payments will need to wait until somebody somewhere is interested in paying. * Thus, channels advertising low fees are likely to have their liquidity bought out by patient forwarding nodes. The above implies that any "payment size distribution" can, and *will*, be manipulated by forwarding nodes out to buy out cheap liquidity. If you introduce an artificial impediment and say "I will only accept payment sizes below N millisats", and then go "I will #zerofeerouting guy", then a forwarding node will just split their rebalance into quanta of N millisats and make a spike in the payment size distribution and drain your channel anyway, so that they can turn around and resell the liquidity at a higher price later. This also suggests to me that fees being paid by out-of-band means (i.e. "monetizing outside of the Lightning forwarding fees") is likely to fail, because forwarding nodes will exploit that and do a hostile takeover of the cheap liquidity. i.e. #zerofeerouting will never be a reliable forwarding node, because all the other forwarding nodes will be taking their liquidity for cheap long before you think to make a payment through them. Rebalances cannot be differentiated from payments unless you force publication of source and destination (and even if you forced that, people can lie about who the *real* source and *real* destination are, so why bother). And rebalances are going to target cheap liquidity and will avoid any non-fee valves you impose. Invisible hand wins, yo. Regards, ZmnSCPxj _______________________________________________ Lightning-dev mailing list Lightning-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/lightning-dev
