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
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:
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