35 sats \ 10 replies \ @DarthCoin 8 Jun 2023 \ on: Why are ⚡️lightning wallet fees so different and high? bitcoin
A payment through LN depends on the route taken.
If the route have 4 hops (4 forwarding nodes) that means each one will take a fee, bbased on the amount you send.
If the route will have 6 hops, for sure will be more expensive than 4.
Each node is charging its own fees for routing and the sender COULD NOT decide which rote exactly should take. The only thing can decide is the first hop, first peer with which is connected. But after that, is how routing protocol is calculating the route.
That means, if a cheap route do not have enough liquidity, will take the next expensive one, that could have more liquidity.
-Here I did last year a research in path finding, routes and fees with different wallets and destinations.
Each node is charging its own fees for routing and the sender COULD NOT decide which rote exactly should take. The only thing can decide is the first hop, first peer with which is connected.
You are completely incorrect. Lightning is onion routed, at the source. The sender is 100% in control of how the payment is routed (modulo wallets like Phoenix, which trust a third party to do that routing for them; but that third party is 100% in control). Nodes in the middle don't even know the route the payment is going to take, let alone choose it.
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But you cannot decide manually the route, only if you do it yourself in a cli command, with route hints and be sure that those peers have enough liquidity.
Those mobile apps cannot do that.
I am totally right when I said that user cannot control the route.
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You the user aren't deciding that. But your wallet software is deciding that, at the source. And you can control that decision, eg with the max fee limit settings available in most wallets.
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Even if you have the option to put a max fee, that will not guarantee that the payment will go through. Will just fail with error "no route".
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Interesting. Any idea why these 3 different wallets would use seemingly wildly different routes to the same destination within minutes of each other?
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They don't decide the route, they can decide only the first hop.
Some of them could have some zero fee channels with other peers and that's why you could have a less fee, but that you don't know for sure, maybe tomorrow you will do again the same test and you will have totally reverse results, because the payment took another route.
It's all about in THAT moment of the payment, how available are the routes.
In LN there's no such thing as always a FIX fee.
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Because of onion routing, doesn't the sender decide every hop?
The sender has to encrypt the payload with the public key of every node in the route
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Again, depends on his peers routes. A router could not decide manually exactly the route. The protocol decide.
Here is a very good presentation by Rene Pickhardt talking about path finding
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Good idea, I will try again later and report
I could see this as alarming / annoying for new users. Another UE issue we need to overcome to reach more ppl
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Why is alarming? Is normal.
Fees on LN will always be variable.
Don't make too much case for that.
And read my guides. I did a lot of testing in all these 10 years with Bitcoin and all these tests became guides. For example this one:
https://darthcoin.substack.com/p/private-lightning-nodes
https://darthcoin.substack.com/p/managing-lightning-node-liquidity
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