From info at AndySchroder.com Wed Jan 3 03:45:50 2018 From: info at AndySchroder.com (Andy Schroder) Date: Tue, 2 Jan 2018 22:45:50 -0500 Subject: [Lightning-dev] General questions about channels In-Reply-To: <87bmic2ynd.fsf@gmail.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> <87bmic2ynd.fsf@gmail.com> Message-ID: <5A4C51EE.60606@AndySchroder.com> Yes, that's what I'm suggesting, but I don't know if it's right or not. I was assuming many small channels would be partially self regulating because people would have to pay for more on chain transaction fees for the opening and closing of the channels. Andy Schroder On 01/02/2018 08:11 AM, Christian Decker wrote: > 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 >>>