From decker.christian at gmail.com Tue Jan 2 13:11:50 2018 From: decker.christian at gmail.com (Christian Decker) Date: Tue, 02 Jan 2018 14:11:50 +0100 Subject: [Lightning-dev] General questions about channels In-Reply-To: <5A4B16F1.80207@AndySchroder.com> References: <5A360843.5060706@AndySchroder.com> <878tdzj2wb.fsf@rustcorp.com.au> <5A432D1E.60902@AndySchroder.com> <5A433685.3050202@AndySchroder.com> <5A433D40.9020805@AndySchroder.com> <0mRpF6YNsI8VWWnlVJIKF1juOXp2EKBFap23S74mi2pljbPGcgnVAFh8kM__EUgzPpNgYBZW5CMP85vto0x1hdDvvksrWBYGTxvMCBtexg8=@protonmail.com> <5A4682DF.6020109@AndySchroder.com> <87mv1z3j2d.fsf@gmail.com> <5A48207D.3010804@AndySchroder.com> <87k1x131yu.fsf@gmail.com> <5A4B16F1.80207@AndySchroder.com> Message-ID: <87bmic2ynd.fsf@gmail.com> I see, are you suggesting that large channels could be an indicator of a large actor trying to attract a lot of payment traffic? Not sure whether that is really a good measure, since it is trivial for a large node to masquerade as any number of smaller nodes, thus hiding its size. We definitely want to discourage this kind of masquerades since it causes a lot more transactions on-chain and results in UTXO fragmentation. In addition what we actually try to guard against are hubs, which have a lot of channels open, not large ones :-) Cheers, Christian Andy Schroder writes: > What you are saying makes perfect sense for the short term. > > What I am talking about could promote a big picture healthier network > long term by discouraging "super nodes" in the network from existing, if > you avoid making connections to nodes that have large channel capacities > with other parties. > > Does this make sense? > > Andy Schroder > > On 01/01/2018 12:47 PM, Christian Decker wrote: >> Andy Schroder writes: >>> I understand that you have to be in agreement with your direct peers. So >>> you don't really care about what agreements others in your route may >>> have in place? I would think that you would choose not to route through >>> hops that violate your capacity limit. >> I'm failing to see why I'd care about a remote channel's capacity, aside >> from it being large enough to cover the amount I want to transfer. As a >> participant routing through a channel that has a higher capacity I do >> not incur any additional risk than from a smaller channel, since the >> payment is guaranteed to be atomic. In the contrary one could argue that >> a higher capacity channel has a higher probability of having sufficient >> capacity in the desired direction to forward my transfer. >> >> Maybe I'm failing to see something? I always interpreted the limit as >> purely self-defense on how much value I'm confident enough to keep in a >> channel. >> >> Cheers, >> Christian >>