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0 sats \ 2 replies \ @k00b OP 16h \ parent \ on: Lightning payment probing behavior is implementation dependent lightning
Probing is free currently, but there are a few proposals for rate-limiting and charging for abuses like this.
It's more like asking everyone in the restaurant to pay $20 for your chocolate bar, recording who could, then telling them never mind. Then asking them to pay $100 for your bottle of wine then never mind. Then asking them to pay for your $500 dinner and so on.
It does. The problem is that nodes trust that participation is genuine. Probing works by pretending that you're making a payment when you know it will fail once it reaches its destination. There's no way for a node to turn off probing if they want to participate in routing payments.
I was thinking many of these tiny ad-like transaction were all of the probes. So, they just use HTLC, then release it. Thanks for the explainer. That's much clearer now.
I wonder whether they'd be some kind of WOT system for nodes that are well-established and known to you. A rule set, like, has this node opened a channel to you in the past, did you initiate a channel with this node in the past, has one of your trusted nodes opened a channel to this node in the past, and so on.. that might develop.
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Trust is tricky in distributed systems. It introduces subjectivity which can be manipulated and tends to discriminate in uneven and unintended ways. But it could allow trusted peers to pay lower sybil fees which should make the network healthier as a whole.
Brink researchers released a paper using a trust+sybil fee approach. Other proposals have escalating fees when abuse is detected.
Sharing because it’s interesting, but SN uses a trust+sybil fee approach to deal with a similar class of problems. I was surprised to learn people were independently exploring trust+sybil fee for the lightning network itself.
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