0 sats \ 8 replies \ @0207a984de OP 29 Dec 2023 \ on: Unidirectional blackholes make no sense on LN bitcoin
Another way to look at it is, 10 hops are creating 10 on-chain TXs to handle what a single on-chain TX could have accomplished. It's like reverse scaling.
Those 10 hops are likely doing 100 or more overall transactions. That's still a scaling win.
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My 10m sats channel drains usually within 1 or 2 transactions. Sometimes 4m or 5m sats at a time. Most of the nodes that I'm connected to have channels way smaller than that, such as 500k or 200k sats channels. Are you sure the 10 hops can handle that many?
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Clearly you are the cheapest liquidity around for a circular rebalance
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But what I'm saying is that the fees don't matter. Once the liquidity is gone, it's gone. I could raise my fees super high and maybe I'll get to "keep my balanced liquidity" but what I'm basically doing is turning my flow to 0. There's no point in that. And as soon as I change it to something that has flow, the balance is gone again. Fees don't fix that.
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i understand what you are saying, i've been running routing nodes for years now and it is a problem. Before the big capacity growth we all milked big sinks like bitfinex with high fees and then just closed at 1vsat/byte.
on the bright side i've had chans on drains that haven't routed anything in more than a year starting to be active in the last months so if you are positioned in the right spots with growing adoption there might be more bidirectional trafficl
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I hope so, that would be great!
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If your channels are draining that fast you probably have low fees. If you have higher fees, you'll get more transactions of lower value.
A unidirectional channel can handle essentially any number of transactions, down to whatever is the capacity / the minimum transaction value (usually 1 sat). How many happen in practice depends on fees.
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That makes sense but it's usually a static number like 10 or 100, especially if it's a small channel. What I'm saying is that these are not sustainable if we have to close them.
LN seems like economically requires people who hold a large number of BTC to make big enough channels that can counteract the price of expensive on-chain TXs. If Bitcoin's future is only full of people with small amounts of BTC and all on-chain TXs are extremely expensive, I don't see how everyone can participate economically.
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