From joost.jager at gmail.com Mon Nov 15 15:25:26 2021 From: joost.jager at gmail.com (Joost Jager) Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2021 16:25:26 +0100 Subject: [Lightning-dev] Route reliability<->fee trade-off control parameter Message-ID: In Lightning pathfinding the two main variables to optimize for are routing fee and reliability. Routing fee is concrete. It is the sat amount that is paid when a payment succeeds. Reliability is a property of a route that can be expressed as a probability. The probability that a route will be successful. During pathfinding, route options are compared against each other. So for example: Route A: fee 10 sat, success probability 50% Route B: fee 20 sat, success probability 80% Which one is the better route? That depends on user preference. A patient user will probably go for route A in the hope of saving on fees whereas for a time-sensitive payment route B looks better. It would be great to offer this trade-off to the user in a simple way. Preferably a single [0, 1] value that controls the selection process. At 0, the route is only optimized for fees and probabilities are ignored completely. At 1, the route is only optimized for reliability and fees are ignored completely. But how to choose between the routes A and B for a value somewhere in between 0 and 1? For example 0.5 - perfect balance between reliability and fee. But what does that mean exactly? Anyone got an idea on how to approach this best? I am looking for a simple formula to decide between routes, preferably with a reasonably sound probability-theoretical basis (whatever that means). Joost -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: