From ZmnSCPxj at protonmail.com  Tue Aug 31 13:41:10 2021
From: ZmnSCPxj at protonmail.com (ZmnSCPxj)
Date: Tue, 31 Aug 2021 13:41:10 +0000
Subject: [Lightning-dev] Do we really want users to solve an NP-hard
	problem when they wish to find a cheap way of paying each
	other on the Lightning Network?
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Good morning Orfeas,


>         Such an approach is much more suitable to debian, since they have full control and a complete view over their "network" of packages, as opposed to LN, which is decentralized, nodes come and go at will and they can be private (even from developers!).

Indeed, I came back to this topic to make this argument as well.
Maintainers of apt repositories often make *some* amount of effort to avoid having too many `Conflict`-ing packages, such that typical simple users never experience the NP-hard bits.
Worse, such apt repositories are definitely central points of coordination.

Now of course users can add PPAs and anyone can create PPAs that others can consume, and the PPA-creation is not curated.
But in practice, even just a handful of PPAs can risk horrible cascades of `Conflict`-ing packages and massive headaches that can only be fixed by just reinstalling the OS from scratch and never using PPAs ever again.

(Indeed, the ability for Nix and Guix to run "on top of" an existing OS is a good alternative to using PPAs, which avoids the `Conflict` issue.)

Now, with Lightning Network, we run the risk that some de facto centralized curator will be consulted to provide good payment solutions.
That centralized curator avoids the NP-hard problems by being able to define which nodes and which channels are allowed to be considered in any payment solution, in much the same way an `apt` repository curator can define which packages are in and out of the repository, all in the name of avoiding the NP-hard problem for most users.
The risk is that such central coordinators may very well dangerously centralize the network in such a way that evicting them is not easy.
In particular, we do not want so central an entity that the choice for users becomes between accepting a centralized LN or making do with the expensive but decentralized base layer.

Regards,
ZmnSCPxj