[Lightning-dev] General questions about channels

[Christian Decker]

I see, are you suggesting that large channels could be an indicator of a
large actor trying to attract a lot of payment traffic? Not sure whether
that is really a good measure, since it is trivial for a large node to
masquerade as any number of smaller nodes, thus hiding its size.

We definitely want to discourage this kind of masquerades since it
causes a lot more transactions on-chain and results in UTXO
fragmentation. In addition what we actually try to guard against are
hubs, which have a lot of channels open, not large ones :-)

Cheers,
Christian

Andy Schroder <info at AndySchroder.com> writes:
> What you are saying makes perfect sense for the short term.
>
> What I am talking about could promote a big picture healthier network 
> long term by discouraging "super nodes" in the network from existing, if 
> you avoid making connections to nodes that have large channel capacities 
> with other parties.
>
> Does this make sense?
>
> Andy Schroder
>
> On 01/01/2018 12:47 PM, Christian Decker wrote:
>> Andy Schroder <info at AndySchroder.com> writes:
>>> I understand that you have to be in agreement with your direct peers. So
>>> you don't really care about what agreements others in your route may
>>> have in place? I would think that you would choose not to route through
>>> hops that violate your capacity limit.
>> I'm failing to see why I'd care about a remote channel's capacity, aside
>> from it being large enough to cover the amount I want to transfer. As a
>> participant routing through a channel that has a higher capacity I do
>> not incur any additional risk than from a smaller channel, since the
>> payment is guaranteed to be atomic. In the contrary one could argue that
>> a higher capacity channel has a higher probability of having sufficient
>> capacity in the desired direction to forward my transfer.
>>
>> Maybe I'm failing to see something? I always interpreted the limit as
>> purely self-defense on how much value I'm confident enough to keep in a
>> channel.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Christian
>>