[Lightning-dev] Opening channels with neighbors for cost/connectivity benefit

[Karan Verma]

Hello,
The sender node doesn’t always have a route to the receiving node accepting
lightning payments and since opening new channels is costly - I was wondering if
there was a smarter way to open channels such that it increases the
connectedness of the sender node with other nodes in the network and also
possibly save money in the intended transaction.
To clarify, if Bob wants to send money to Alice but doesn’t have a route to her.
He would need to open a new channel with Alice and send the money. This is
costly for Bob if that was the only transaction he ever wanted to do with Alice.
However, if Alice was connected to Charlie and Dave (Unidirectional: Charlie ->
Alice & Dave -> Alice due to the amount being sent). He could instead connect
with Charlie/Dave or nodes connected with them which have a route to Alice
through Charlie/Dave such that it minimizes the transaction cost to reaching
Alice (some routes might have negative fee) and maximizes the number of nodes
Bob can now reach through this channel. Lets say if Bob chose Charlie's
neighbor, then he can now reach at-least three nodes - Charlie's neighbor,
Charlie and Alice and end up paying less.
Essentially we're sorting choice of the nodes to open a channel with by
transaction fee and connectedness it brings to the origin node. This would
benefit Bob in the long term and also maybe lightning network as a whole. I'm
new to lightning and would appreciate feedback on this idea. Thanks.
-Karan
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