From andrea.raspitzu at acinq.fr Fri Jan 18 16:46:16 2019 From: andrea.raspitzu at acinq.fr (Andrea RASPITZU) Date: Fri, 18 Jan 2019 17:46:16 +0100 Subject: [Lightning-dev] Network probes Message-ID: Good morning list, I know there have been discussion around how (and if) we should probe the network to check for the liveliness of a path before sending out the payment. Currently we issue a payment with a random payment_hash that is not redeemable by anyone, if the destination (and the path) is `lively` it will respond Error. Assuming we do want to probe, and it make sense to assume so because it can't be prevented, we can improve it by using the `padding` of the `per_hop` field of the onion; with a single bit of the padding we can tell the final node that this is a probe and not an actual payment. This saves the receiving node from doing a database lookup (checking if it has the preimage for such a payment_hash) and it does not reveal anything to intermediate nodes, we don't want them to change the behavior if they know it's a probe and not an actual payment. I believe probing can help reducing the error rate of payments (and even detect stale channels?) and I'm looking forward to have some feedback, and submit a draft. Cheers, Andrea. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: