0 sats \ 0 replies \ @shibe OP 25 Apr 2023 \ parent \ on: Is Lightning truly "infinitely scalable"? (Understanding HTLCs) bitcoin
Fair point, however I still see channel jamming as a potential issue for Lightning. Nothing's stopping you from deciding your HTLCs should take just a little bit longer to settle, locking up the liquidity for the nodes in the path. Darth pointed me to Rene Pickhardt's work, and I found something interesting there:
As many of you know I am currently writing a paper about the fundamental limitations of the scaling abilities of the Lightning Network to conduct Bitcoin payments [3]. Most folks I talk to see deliberate and malicious channel jamming as a problem. While I agree with the problem I think the situation is worse. It is my current understanding that natural congestion resulting from the selfish behavior of both sending and routing nodes will be a huge challenge for the network. This is amplified by the uncertainty (for example about liquidity). However, even without uncertainty it will create an upper boundary of how many payments per second the participants of the network will be able to conduct. This boundary is more or less given by the weighted betweenness centrality of the most central node and the routing throughput that this node is able to handle. More on this is soon to come here...
He posted this in January of this month, so hopefully this paper he's talking about will come out soon. The current proposals for preventing such jamming don't seem great either, from things like credit limits to "reputation tokens". But I trust that LN will evolve and we'll see better solutions
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