[Lightning-dev] An Idea to Improve Connectivity of the Graph

[Alejandro Ranchal Pedrosa]

Hi Christian,

> That's not as bad a tradeoff as people usually interpret, the DMC
> construction has parameters that allow tweaking the number of
> invalidations, and with parameters similar to LN we can have 1.4 billion
> updates. Which is years of operation without need to
> re-anchor. In addition penaltyless invalidation has a number of
> advantages,

As far as I understand, long-lasting DMCs require either:

     (a) an initial Refund transaction with a very distant relative 
locktime
     (b) periodic updates in the form of a Refund transaction pointing 
to a new Refund transaction resetting initial the locktime, instead of 
actually refunding.

     For an extreme case of (a), if one party goes unresponsive and 
decides not to sign new commitments then the counterparty in the DMC 
will have its funds locked for a significant amount of time, without 
penalising the unresponsive party. In the extreme case of (b), either if 
as a result of a malicious, unresponsive, or honest participant, each 
new refund transaction that resets the refunds may end up hitting the 
blockchain, which means the worst-case utility of the channel itself 
decreasing due to accumulative blockchain fees. Is this the trade-off 
you speak of? if so, can you point at any resource where this trade-off 
is tackled to get worst-case utility similar to that of LN channels?

Best,
Alejandro.