From joost.jager at gmail.com Mon Nov 15 19:44:20 2021 From: joost.jager at gmail.com (Joost Jager) Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2021 20:44:20 +0100 Subject: [Lightning-dev] Route reliability<->fee trade-off control parameter In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: One direction that I explored is to start with a statement by the user in this form: "If there is a route with a success probability of 50%, then I am willing to pay up to 1.8x the routing fee for an alternative route that has a 80% success probability" I like this because it isn't an abstract weight or factor. It is actually clear what this means. What I didn't yet succeed in is to find a model where I can plug in 50%, 80% and 1.8x and generalizes it to arbitrary inputs A% and B%. But it seems to me that there must be some probabilistic equation / law / rule / theorem / ... that can support this. Joost. On Mon, Nov 15, 2021 at 4:25 PM Joost Jager wrote: > 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: