ZK-gossip for lightning channel announcements

The email discusses an innovative but aggressive approach to managing channel closures within a network, marking a departure from current practices. Traditionally, nodes prune channels from their view of the network if no updates are received for them within a two-week period. The new model proposes a more radical strategy where nodes would drop all channels every specified number of weeks, necessitating the periodic rebroadcast of announcement data for active channels. This change is significant as it shifts from rebroadcasting only channel updates—information concerning routing policies—to including announcements that keep channels visible and operable.

Moreover, the message touches upon the privacy implications of the proposed system. Currently, when a channel opens, the capacity is publicly disclosed, allowing verifiers to match this against committed outputs using on-chain data starting from a specific utreexo checkpoint height. This process, while functional, inadvertently leaks information since it enables the tracking of channel capacities over time. An alternative suggested involves either completely omitting the capacity field from disclosures or adjusting it based on certain criteria as hinted at in previous discussions regarding Gossip 2.0. However, such omissions could potentially complicate path finding for payments within the network. Path finding algorithms commonly factor in channel capacity along with historical data to predict the likelihood of successful payment transmission, implying that changes in how capacity information is handled could influence user experience and the efficiency of network operations.