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17 sats \ 1 reply \ @standardcrypto 26 Mar \ parent \ on: Are we close to consensus for Bitcoin's next upgrade? bitcoin
It occurred to me that another overlooked factor is future evolution of lightning node reputation, which is possible even with nymous nodes hiding behind tor.
I think routing nodes are unlikely to cheat because it violates their business model, like miners are unlikely to help double spend cheaters even if there is a short term benefit. These are human beings behind the servers, with morals (some without but still with reputation) and if the game theory INCLUDING human factors and psychology works, lightning will work. Just like bitcoin works, even if you could argue some cockamamie goldfinger attack scenario where miners should 51% attack bitcoin and profit with defi shorts if they were rational, but somehow they don't.
So the minimum safe capital to defend a channel under 99.999% probability conditions, may be much lower than a cold blooded mechanistic analysis that ignores human factors and reputation, might suggest.
Peter Todd's view of the basic math is laid out here:
https://petertodd.org/2024/covenant-dependent-layer-2-review#lightnings-scaling-limits
evolution of lightning node reputation
Yes that's absolutely right, people's vision got clouded by the idea of earning routing fees in some Tor-adjacent cypher-fantasy.
Since Lightning is literally just payment channels, the best peers were always meant to be peers you have some form of extra-protocol economic relationship with. The channel graph would ideally resemble a web-of-trust.
This was really important in the very earliest days when implementations were very buggy, many cases of out-of-band cooperation on things like crashed nodes and force closing channels to help your peer recover.
This is one of many reasons we're laying Nostr into the node-side of things with Lightning.Pub, as a social and persistence layer for nodes.
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