1 sat \ 1 reply \ @k00b 21 Apr 2022 \ on: Paper Takeaway: Towards Enhancing the Robustness of Scale-Free Networks.... bitcoin
As there is no central coordination in Lightning, how might we encourage such rewiring? It seems like we'd need to incentivize "wires" that exist for the sake of robustness, but perhaps don't actually route payments. It seems like we have a hub and spoke topology because the network's incentives favor it.
Lovely question! Check out the explanation to algorithm 4 in the paper, I'm not sure I explained it well enough in the writeup.
You are right, nodes are only capable of opening channels between themselves and someone else, so this algorithm would have to be adapted. The algorithm selects 4 nodes according to some properties. Then the easiest modification would be to open channels with them to a fifth node (your node).
Another idea is to just insert yourself as one of the 4 nodes. You could do this artificially (replace one of the four with yourself at random), or you could exclude candidate nodes from the algorithm. By excluding nodes with a greater degree than you, you would become node i in the algorithm. Then just keep the actual channels you can open.
Robustness tells us how well a network can maintain service when nodes become unavailable (failure/attack/liquidity). Using the method from the paper should distribute closeness centrality and improve path diversity between nodes. But you're right, I don't think people are necessarily incentivized to open channels in this way, it's more of an altruistic strategy.
It would be interesting to see how well the robustness of LN could be improved by a limited number of rewirings.
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