From pm+lists at acinq.fr Tue Sep 15 12:10:18 2015 From: pm+lists at acinq.fr (Pierre) Date: Tue, 15 Sep 2015 14:10:18 +0200 Subject: [Lightning-dev] network topology and routing Message-ID: Hello, I know there hasn't been much work on routing yet (not that I am aware of at least), but it seems there is a consensus around the fact that the target network topology would look like this : https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/acinq/public/lightning_network_1.svg implying that : - there would exist multiple paths to a target user - reaching a target user would require several hops - some nodes might even be connected only to nodes This puzzles me because the network topology I expected would look more like this : https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/acinq/public/lightning_network_2.svg I am not saying each node should be aware of every other node, but that : - nodes connected only to nodes shouldn't exist - when user A sends a payment to user B, it goes through at most 2 nodes, or just 1 if A and B are connected to the same node The reason for that is there is an incentive for reducing the number of hops right ? Because it is faster (each hop adds latency) and cheaper (each hop adds a fee). With that in mind, why would routing be more complicated than just @ ? Then we just agree on a standard port and that's it ! Isn't it how the internet works already ? Why do we need an application-level routing on top of the IP routing ? Now that I made a fool of myself, please correct me :-) Cheers Pierre -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: