Bitcoin Stack Exchange
Bitcoin Stack Exchange

Questions tagged [lightning-routing]

131 questions
29
votes
3 answers

How are paths found in Lightning Network?

I understand now how multihop payments can work in LN, but how do we discover payment paths in Lightning Network in the first place? Obviously you'd need to take into account the available capacity of the route, and you'd want to discover the…
Murch
  • 71,155
  • 33
  • 180
  • 600
15
votes
3 answers

Is centralization in the Lightning network inevitable? Why (not)?

Especially keeping in mind the possibility of single-funded channels (see Tadge's Google Doc Slides), buying from an exchange and concurrently opening a payment channel on the Lightning network would seem a particularly simple entry to the LN.…
Murch
  • 71,155
  • 33
  • 180
  • 600
11
votes
1 answer

Lightning Route Discovery - How to know capacity in each direction?

So i have a question how routing works in the LN. I read partly through the RFC described in https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lightning-rfc but I have still this open question. I know every node in LN has the whole network topology information,…
blacktemplar
  • 253
  • 1
  • 6
10
votes
1 answer

How is a node in the middle prohibited from keeping the money in a routed Payment in Lightning network?

It is my understanding that Lightning is to scale with users having only few payment channels by leveraging the six degrees of separation theory to facilitate payment routing. I understand how onion routing is employed to obfuscate origin and target…
Murch
  • 71,155
  • 33
  • 180
  • 600
9
votes
1 answer

What are the downsides of Hodl Invoices?

As far as I understand hodl invoices enable some interesting use cases. However, I heard that they can be detrimental to the network. Is that correct and in what way? Additionally, at a talk at the Lightning Conference 2019 it was mentioned that…
nickler
  • 776
  • 6
  • 11
9
votes
2 answers

What criteria should be taken into account when selecting nodes to create new lightning channels with?

Alex Bosworth recently pointed out: I see people connect to a "well connected" node on LN and by that they mean they connect to a node with lots of channels. The number of channels is actually a contra-indicator of a node's ability to route. Good…
Murch
  • 71,155
  • 33
  • 180
  • 600
9
votes
1 answer

Would it be possible to send money through the Lightning Network to an offline address?

My understanding is that the current Lightning Network spec requires an address receiving money to sign things with its private key - which requires the owner of that key to be online. Are there any techniques that would allow some 3rd party to…
B T
  • 1,569
  • 13
  • 27
9
votes
1 answer

Channels state validation in lightning network?

I looked into docs but didn't find any information, how do client get information about the state of intermediate channels? Since channel transactions are offchain, and only channel participants knows current channel state (each peer balance) how…
alex
  • 373
  • 1
  • 5
9
votes
1 answer

Can PTLCs and HTLCs be mixed along a route?

When PTLCs get introduced on the Lightning Network, do all hops along a route need to use just one of either HTLCs or PTLCs, or would it be possible to create a route where some nodes use PTLCs and some use HTLCs?
Murch
  • 71,155
  • 33
  • 180
  • 600
8
votes
1 answer

How many paths are tried on average before a payment succeeds in Lightning?

In Lightning, the sender can never be sure that a multi-hop payment will go through, as intermediary nodes don't announce the distribution of funds in their channels (only the total capacity). Is there any publicly available data on how many…
Sergei Tikhomirov
  • 1,430
  • 7
  • 17
8
votes
2 answers

For lightning network, can I surround myself with a bunch of nodes to increase anonymity?

Let's say I'm on a Lightning Network. Can I create a bunch of nodes, and do all my spending through those nodes? Can you hide the fact that these nodes are likely controlled by the same person? How often would you need to contact the blockchain?…
PyRulez
  • 369
  • 1
  • 9
7
votes
1 answer

Non-bidirection payment channels for lightning network

I am trying to understand the technology behind LN and similar concepts. As I understand it, LN is a network of bidirectional channels, which are created with some limited capacity, within which the channel can operate. So, we can have Alice…
Wapac
  • 1,044
  • 7
  • 16
7
votes
1 answer

What does TLV stand for?

I'm reading about the gossip protocol and wanted to know what a TLV is. I can't find what it means anywhere.
CriptoLuis
  • 71
  • 1
6
votes
1 answer

What is the Big-O for LN bandwidth? Can anyone answer this or provide a link to a spec that is sufficient enough for us to calculate it?

When I worked at Google, if someone wanted to deploy a network application they would need to provide a document to the SREs detailing the behaviour of the application at scale in terms of Big-O. Does something like this exist for LN? I understand…
Clayton Rabenda
  • 161
  • 1
6
votes
1 answer

Routing in Bitcoin Lightning Network

Here is all we can find in the Lightning Network whitepaper about payment routing process that it is completely unclear to me (at least it is not enough to know what happens exactly at time of finding the best optimized path for a payment between…
Questioner
  • 1,151
  • 8
  • 22
1
2 3
…
8 9