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66 sats \ 2 replies \ @andyleroy 17 Jul 2022 \ parent \ on: Zero fee routing as a donation to everyone bitcoin
I agree, the incentives need to keep everything moving in the right direction. And to have accessibility to everyone is paramount, regardless of our altruistic or capitalistic behavior and intentions.
I'm no expert on the underlying protocols at play, but there seems to be some slight differences in running a lightning node blindly than that from bitcoin. My laptop that runs bitcoin core can almost only help the bitcoin network as a validator. The only time that wouldn't be the case is if I download the whole blockchain and take up bandwidth from peers, and then turn it off. But even if I turn off my laptop, etc - I'll generally serve as 100% net benefit to everyone.
Compared to lightning however, there may be many cases where I could be detrimental to the performance of the network - if my node doesn't have good uptime or balanced channels, I may make the path finding for payments more computationally expensive for other nodes or introduce more paths for failure when my selected channel doesn't actually have liquidity on the right side.
Not saying these detriments are worth some sort of "prevention from acting however I want to with my node", but it doesn't seem as cut and dry as the benefit to running a bitcoin node.
But to your points, it's still all likely for the better as these sort of things would have to be worked out over time, and getting everyone to adopt it is probably the most important thing. I just hope that there will be enough profitability and roi to compensate all of the professional node operators who drive forward such great innovation for everyone.
Your ideas on the net negative outcome of a poor LN node are very interesting. I hadn't thought about them, thanks for sharing. I guess nodes and their implementations will also keep developing heuristics to avoid the bad apples. And perhaps reputation systems appear at some point (I think players like amboss are doing a great job in positioning themselves for these kind of roles).
And as for the profitability... Let's hope so. I frequently dream awake about what will happen when we see a massive jam at the mempool (December 2017 caliber). If things go as expected, the bottleneck at the mempool should both incentivize shifting transactions to LN (allowing node operators to increase fees and still get routing activity) and also make it more expensive to deploy new capital to open channels, again giving more gunpowder for the existing operators and channels to increase fees and benefits.
It feels a bit as if, nowadays, we live in a time where everyone can build a highway for free and no one charges much on cars going through their highways because there is barely any traffic. But if one day highways become prohibitively expensive to build and traffic suddenly spikes...
Oh well, let's keep on waiting to see how things unfold and enjoying the present as well. Thanks for the interesting discussion.
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Likewise, thanks for all your points and original post! And I love the highways analogy :) I'm hoping we continue to see adoption and excitement for lightning continue to grow
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