René Pickhardt [ARCHIVE] on Nostr: 📅 Original date posted:2022-05-26 📝 Original message: Dear fellow lightning ...
📅 Original date posted:2022-05-26
📝 Original message:
Dear fellow lightning developers,
please note my recent blog article titled "Price of Anarchy from selfish
routing strategies on the Lightning Network" [1] where we investigate how
the selfish behavior of nodes sending Bitcoin over the Lightning Network
may lead to higher drain on channels which in turn is expected to result in
higher depletion and failure rates for payments on the network. All of the
observations have been derived purely be looking at statistical measures
and computations on the data that the Gossip Protocol and Bitcoin Network
provides about the topology of the Lightning Network. No probing or
empirical experiments had to be conducted to derive these theoretical
results. All code can be found in the lnresearch repository at [2].
While those preliminary results are only presented for some of the
strategies that are currently being deployed by `pay` implementations we
have not been able yet to study the dynamics of the entire game, secondary
effects or to find the dominant strategies of routing and sending nodes.
Due to the implications with respect to reliability and payment failure
rates - which I assume many have observed in the wild - I thought I would
already share these early results with you.
While routing nodes seem to be able to mitigate some of the effects we note
in the article that it seems as if the routing nodes can hardly engage into
selfish behavior or strategies themselves to help with flow and congestion
control. This is because it seems as if all operations that we can
currently think of that routing nodes could engage in are limited (through
protocol design) if applied at scale. E.g:
* Adopting fees (limited through gossip relay policies which prevent spam)
* Opening / closing channels (limited through block space)
* Pro active off chain rebalancing (limited through fees that other nodes
charge and the time needed for finding opportunities to conduct rebalancing
and the additional load this put to the network )
* Pro active on chain rebalancing (limited through block space and routing
fees)
I hope the described effects won't be too strong for the expected traffic
and usage of the network so that the technology will work properly at the
required scale. I am very happy for your thoughts, feedback, comments and
questions as I find it fascinating to see how the game theory of the
Lightning network will eventually play out and at least in my current
understanding seems to produce limitations to the amount of traffic the
protocol may eventually be able to handle.
with kind Regards Rene Pickhardt
[1]:
https://blog.bitmex.com/price-of-anarchy-from-selfish-routing-strategies/
[2]: https://github.com/lnresearch/Price-Of-Anarchy-in-Selfish-Routing
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📝 Original message:
Dear fellow lightning developers,
please note my recent blog article titled "Price of Anarchy from selfish
routing strategies on the Lightning Network" [1] where we investigate how
the selfish behavior of nodes sending Bitcoin over the Lightning Network
may lead to higher drain on channels which in turn is expected to result in
higher depletion and failure rates for payments on the network. All of the
observations have been derived purely be looking at statistical measures
and computations on the data that the Gossip Protocol and Bitcoin Network
provides about the topology of the Lightning Network. No probing or
empirical experiments had to be conducted to derive these theoretical
results. All code can be found in the lnresearch repository at [2].
While those preliminary results are only presented for some of the
strategies that are currently being deployed by `pay` implementations we
have not been able yet to study the dynamics of the entire game, secondary
effects or to find the dominant strategies of routing and sending nodes.
Due to the implications with respect to reliability and payment failure
rates - which I assume many have observed in the wild - I thought I would
already share these early results with you.
While routing nodes seem to be able to mitigate some of the effects we note
in the article that it seems as if the routing nodes can hardly engage into
selfish behavior or strategies themselves to help with flow and congestion
control. This is because it seems as if all operations that we can
currently think of that routing nodes could engage in are limited (through
protocol design) if applied at scale. E.g:
* Adopting fees (limited through gossip relay policies which prevent spam)
* Opening / closing channels (limited through block space)
* Pro active off chain rebalancing (limited through fees that other nodes
charge and the time needed for finding opportunities to conduct rebalancing
and the additional load this put to the network )
* Pro active on chain rebalancing (limited through block space and routing
fees)
I hope the described effects won't be too strong for the expected traffic
and usage of the network so that the technology will work properly at the
required scale. I am very happy for your thoughts, feedback, comments and
questions as I find it fascinating to see how the game theory of the
Lightning network will eventually play out and at least in my current
understanding seems to produce limitations to the amount of traffic the
protocol may eventually be able to handle.
with kind Regards Rene Pickhardt
[1]:
https://blog.bitmex.com/price-of-anarchy-from-selfish-routing-strategies/
[2]: https://github.com/lnresearch/Price-Of-Anarchy-in-Selfish-Routing
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