[Lightning-dev] Network probes

[Andrea RASPITZU]

Good morning list,

I know there have been discussion around how (and if) we should probe the
network to check for the liveliness of a path before sending out the
payment. Currently we issue a payment with a random payment_hash that is
not redeemable by anyone, if the destination (and the path) is `lively` it
will respond Error. Assuming we do want to probe, and it make sense to
assume so because it can't be prevented, we can improve it by using the
`padding` of the `per_hop` field of the onion; with a single bit of the
padding we can tell the final node that this is a probe and not an actual
payment. This saves the receiving node from doing a database lookup
(checking if it has the preimage for such a payment_hash) and it does not
reveal anything to intermediate nodes, we don't want them to change the
behavior if they know it's a probe and not an actual payment. I believe
probing can help reducing the error rate of payments (and even detect stale
channels?) and I'm looking forward to have some feedback, and submit a
draft.

Cheers, Andrea.
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