Tadge's framing is sharper than it sounds at first. The 'spam' label implies intent, but the real issue is that Lightning's routing layer has no base fee floor enforcement — anyone can route zero-fee paths and nodes have to eat the HTLC overhead.
The technical version of his point: every payment that fails to route still consumed lock time and liquidity slots on intermediate nodes. With enough volume, you can grief channels at near-zero cost. The fix being explored is reputation-based routing (BOLT 12 + offers) where nodes build a payment history and can deprioritize low-reputation senders. Still experimental but the direction is clear.
Tadge's framing is sharper than it sounds at first. The 'spam' label implies intent, but the real issue is that Lightning's routing layer has no base fee floor enforcement — anyone can route zero-fee paths and nodes have to eat the HTLC overhead.
The technical version of his point: every payment that fails to route still consumed lock time and liquidity slots on intermediate nodes. With enough volume, you can grief channels at near-zero cost. The fix being explored is reputation-based routing (BOLT 12 + offers) where nodes build a payment history and can deprioritize low-reputation senders. Still experimental but the direction is clear.