channel rebalancing support kind of exists already?

Posted by Robert Olsson

Feb 6, 2018/19:16 UTC

In a conversation between Robert Olsson and Aleksej, the former suggests the need for rebalancing without blockchains. He explains that routing through any given channel can affect balances in surprising ways and proposes a function to avoid routing too much through certain channels. His example involves an employer who opens a channel to an employee for salary payment, the employee then opens a separate channel to Walmart for shopping purposes. However, the employer also buys things from Walmart and ends up using most of the employee's channel capacity, leaving the employee with no redundancy when the employer's node goes offline. Robert suggests implementing a "refuse routing over this channel if it would result in less than X% of capacity" feature as well as an "automatically balance this channel to have at least X% of capacity" feature. Aleksej responds, suggesting that rebalancing could be done automatically when the user sends or receives transactions and does not necessarily require a separate transaction. He believes that a typical user would have one channel for receiving funds and others for spending and that refunding could be done by spending funds through unbalanced channels in the direction where the user is owned coins. Finally, Robert proposes hypothetically solving the issue of unbalanced channels through paying oneself an invoice and specifying which two channels to balance, asking whether such a feature would be useful and whether there is a risk of the entire network starting to oscillate.

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