📅 Original date posted:2023-02-19
📝 Original message:
Currently, LN primarily uses 2 of 2 multisig channel, though I have heard people talk about opening channels in more complex transactions than 2 of 2 multisigs.
Thinking through all the topology and number theory aspects of it, I think that if channels were mostly between 3 nodes instead of 2, there could be some big advantages:
- Channels can advertise which node has the lowest balance, helping with balance of channels, and overall liquidity. There would need to be vague enough thresholds to define when to even bother mentioning this, I imagine something like under 10% remaining on one versus the other two would be sufficiently anonymous.
- A node with 3 channels attached to it can be considered as completely connected, and can basically route to 10 different next hops for only 3 opening transaction fees.
- The time cost is basically doubled - two nodes for a channel means request and two messages between the peers to propagate their PSBT channel state, 3 nodes to a channel means 1 request and 6 messages to settle a new payment, which each node in the trio can more or less dispatch two messages at the same time, so, 3 message cycles, or average around 600ms from anywhere to anywhere on the internet.
- The channel's lowest balance could be one-bit boolean value publicly broadcast, meaning that peers selecting hops for a payment route can easily avoid adding to a channel stuck on one side. Pathfinding is a real hassle in the current design of LN. It is hard to navigate in the dark, but if you can sense the distance to the nearest object you can orient easily.
The magic of tesselation gave us lightning fast 3d raster based 3d modeling, and is based on the infinite tesselation of triangles. Oh, there is 4 points possible, but it really just complicates things. I'm pretty sure that the new Unreal 5 "nanite" engine only works with uniform 3 point surfaces, at least, it definitely looks like that based on the 4 color map versions that show the polygons. And anyhow, a "rectangle" is just two adjacent triangles, why bother with this extra, extraneous nonsense of calling two polygons with a common axis "squares".
The only other issue that is on my mind lately relating to LN is 0 conf channels. I hadn't thought of "channels" as being 2 dimensional, since they represent a midpoint between two other points. But a midpoint is an abstract term, not just a word used for 1D lines but also 2D and nD shapes.
It seems to me like there could be a negotiation protocol to pre-arrange a not yet mined opening tx for a 3 way lightning channel, that could effectively lock in every party such that it can't wriggle out of the commitment. This just wouldn't be possible with a 2 way. It then wouldn't matter a bit how big the fee was since the parties are already in consensus and have the ability to back out at any moment.
~ l0k1
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l0k1 [ARCHIVE] /
npub1cn…nk0lp
2023-06-09 13:08:10
in reply to nevent1q…6q8n
Author Public Key
npub1cnqvaafds7k0xftfwuhe3a5aug53n3ftzdv5adetfdhyge4nwrcsunk0lpSeen on
wss://relay.nostr.bandPublished at
2023-06-09 13:08:10Event JSON
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"content": "📅 Original date posted:2023-02-19\n📝 Original message:\nCurrently, LN primarily uses 2 of 2 multisig channel, though I have heard people talk about opening channels in more complex transactions than 2 of 2 multisigs.\n\nThinking through all the topology and number theory aspects of it, I think that if channels were mostly between 3 nodes instead of 2, there could be some big advantages:\n\n- Channels can advertise which node has the lowest balance, helping with balance of channels, and overall liquidity. There would need to be vague enough thresholds to define when to even bother mentioning this, I imagine something like under 10% remaining on one versus the other two would be sufficiently anonymous.\n\n- A node with 3 channels attached to it can be considered as completely connected, and can basically route to 10 different next hops for only 3 opening transaction fees.\n\n- The time cost is basically doubled - two nodes for a channel means request and two messages between the peers to propagate their PSBT channel state, 3 nodes to a channel means 1 request and 6 messages to settle a new payment, which each node in the trio can more or less dispatch two messages at the same time, so, 3 message cycles, or average around 600ms from anywhere to anywhere on the internet.\n\n- The channel's lowest balance could be one-bit boolean value publicly broadcast, meaning that peers selecting hops for a payment route can easily avoid adding to a channel stuck on one side. Pathfinding is a real hassle in the current design of LN. It is hard to navigate in the dark, but if you can sense the distance to the nearest object you can orient easily.\n\nThe magic of tesselation gave us lightning fast 3d raster based 3d modeling, and is based on the infinite tesselation of triangles. Oh, there is 4 points possible, but it really just complicates things. I'm pretty sure that the new Unreal 5 \"nanite\" engine only works with uniform 3 point surfaces, at least, it definitely looks like that based on the 4 color map versions that show the polygons. And anyhow, a \"rectangle\" is just two adjacent triangles, why bother with this extra, extraneous nonsense of calling two polygons with a common axis \"squares\".\n\nThe only other issue that is on my mind lately relating to LN is 0 conf channels. I hadn't thought of \"channels\" as being 2 dimensional, since they represent a midpoint between two other points. But a midpoint is an abstract term, not just a word used for 1D lines but also 2D and nD shapes.\n\nIt seems to me like there could be a negotiation protocol to pre-arrange a not yet mined opening tx for a 3 way lightning channel, that could effectively lock in every party such that it can't wriggle out of the commitment. This just wouldn't be possible with a 2 way. It then wouldn't matter a bit how big the fee was since the parties are already in consensus and have the ability to back out at any moment.\n\n~ l0k1\n-------------- next part --------------\nA non-text attachment was scrubbed...\nName: publickey - stalker.loki at protonmail.ch - 0x0AC723EB.asc\nType: application/pgp-keys\nSize: 665 bytes\nDesc: not available\nURL: \u003chttp://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/attachments/20230219/0ae8526b/attachment.bin\u003e\n-------------- next part --------------\nA non-text attachment was scrubbed...\nName: signature.asc\nType: application/pgp-signature\nSize: 249 bytes\nDesc: OpenPGP digital signature\nURL: \u003chttp://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/attachments/20230219/0ae8526b/attachment.sig\u003e",
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