From anton.kumaigorodskiy at outlook.com Sat Oct 29 18:08:27 2016 From: anton.kumaigorodskiy at outlook.com (Anton Kumaigorodskiy) Date: Sat, 29 Oct 2016 18:08:27 +0000 Subject: [Lightning-dev] Single channel on mobile clients Message-ID: It seems to me there are substantial reasons for a mobile LN wallet to only support a single payment channel: - Typical usage scenario on phones and tablets will be "open an app" - "conduct a micropayment" - "send an app to background to be automatically shut down by OS in a few minutes". So it's safe to say that majority of LN nodes on such devices will be offline 99% of time and as such won't be of much use in relaying payments. Also often it might not be in user's interest if a portion of funds suddenly becomes locked in HTLC (especially if the lock lasts for hours). - One channel with 1 BTC is better than two 0.5 BTC channels for an end user in a way that he can receive and send larger amounts: two 0.5 BTC channels will never let me receive 0.51 BTC (AFAIK combining multiple channel capacities for a single transaction is possible in theory but won't be implemented in initial LN release). - Last but not least, having a single payment channel improves UX and simplifies UI and thus lowers the barrier for adoption. Also it is my understanding that mobile users won't care much about relaying payments (and for those of them who will using a phone for this purpose is a bad idea anyway). My current plan as I continue working on an Android LN wallet is to design UI and UX in a way that only supports a single payment channel but it's quite possible I've missed something important here so once again I'd like to hear if you think this is a viable approach. Anton -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: