Good morning list, I have also seen elsewhere someone expressing the idea that "rebalancing is not exploitative, as the low-fee nodes are freely allowing use of their capacity at low feerates".
First, let me make the strong claim that I am in fact a 100% human being, and very specifically deny that I am an advanced AI who has abducted humans and vivisected their brains in order to figure out how to model human being thinking strategies. Let us suppose that I, in a surfeit of generosity to their community, leave out a table filled with widgets on my completely existent front lawn, with the sign "Free Widgets! Take what you need :)" Now let us suppose that a few blocks later, I find my table empty, and across the street there is now a table full of widgets with the sign "Widgets for sale! Only 100 sats each :)" If I were a human being (which I would like to claim I am, in fact) then I would consider it an abuse of my generosity. In this analogy, `htlc_maximum_msat` would be a sign saying "Free Widgets! Take only one per human being please :)" As identities are trivially creatable by picking a random number out of a CSPRNG, this is not going to limit anyone who wants to fill their "Widgets for sale!" table, as they can easily pick new identities to take one free widget for each random number they can pump out of a CSPRNG. In this analogy, then, forwardable peerswaps is a recycling scheme for widgets (as the operation effectively returns sats that were sent out previously), which replenishes the stock of widgets back to whoever gave them in the first place. In such a case, there is now little need for the "Widgets for sale!" guy across the street to bother crossing the street and pilfer the "free widgets" table. -- People have also claimed that this protocol benefits only net senders, and further claimed that net senders are few on the network. However, I should point out that in a currency with fixed supply, for net receivers to exist, there must be net senders. And rebalancing with not need to be done at all if there were no net receivers. If merchants and businesses were also sending out funds over Lightning to their employees, shareholders, and suppliers, then they would not be net receivers and would immediately get inbound liquidity as well. But the world is not yet transitioned to fully using Bitcoin over Lightning, and thus, there must be those who hold money in Lightning and trade them for other currencies on other networks, serving as interfaces to legacy currency systems. This implies they are net receivers on the Lightning Network. But as noted, there can be no net receivers on a fixed-supply currency without net senders. The whole point of the cryptocurrency is that money cannot be created out of nothing. Thus, there must be more net senders than might readily be visible. I should note that the payment protocol gives very good privacy to senders, and despite my best efforts, unpublished channels remain amazingly popular. This suggests to me that there are in fact many net senders that are simply not seen, and if we implement forwardable peerswaps on a wide scale across the network, they will initiate such swaps and lead to net receivers getting more inbound capacity on the network. -- Apparently, Alex Bosworth already expressed this idea before. This simply means we should consider implementing this sooner. Regards, ZmnSCPxj _______________________________________________ Lightning-dev mailing list Lightning-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/lightning-dev
