It seems to me by reading BOLT #7 that every node in the lightning network must be aware of every other. That is necessary to choose a complete route to send a transaction for example.
If the lightning network grows large, one could imagine multiple network nodes per person, so say 7e10 nodes. For a fully connected graph, there must also be 7e10 channels, and likely many more. That means each node, upon joining the network, must download, keep in local storage, and keep updates on at least 35TB of data to be able to send payments elsewhere on the network. To me, that doesn't seem feasible. Surely there needs to be some kind of method whereby a peer can keep track of only the nearby nodes, and have some kind of routing table for groups of more distant nodes, which need not individually be known. A DHT is an example of that. Designing such a system where no intermediate node knows both sender and receiver sounds hard, but possible... Why aren't we doing that?
_______________________________________________ Lightning-dev mailing list [email protected] https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/lightning-dev
