l0k1 [ARCHIVE] on Nostr: 📅 Original date posted:2023-02-19 🗒️ Summary of this message: Opening ...

📅 Original date posted:2023-02-19
🗒️ Summary of this message: Opening Lightning Network channels between three nodes instead of two could have advantages such as better balance and liquidity, more efficient routing, and easier pathfinding. A negotiation protocol for pre-arranging a not-yet-mined opening transaction for a three-way channel could also be possible.
📝 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
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: publickey - stalker.loki at protonmail.ch - 0x0AC723EB.asc
Type: application/pgp-keys
Size: 665 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/attachments/20230219/0ae8526b/attachment.bin>;
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 249 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/attachments/20230219/0ae8526b/attachment.sig>;