lightning-dev

Single channel on mobile clients

Single channel on mobile clients

Original Postby Christian Decker

Posted on: October 30, 2016 15:46 UTC

In an email to the Lightning-dev mailing list, Anton Kumaigorodskiy discussed reasons why a mobile Lightning Network (LN) wallet should only support a single payment channel.

He suggested that having multiple channels may not be useful as mobile nodes will be offline 99% of the time, and it may not be in the user's interest if funds become locked for extended periods. Additionally, combining multiple channel capacities for a single transaction is possible in theory but not implemented in the initial LN release. However, Christian argued against this approach, stating that two channels with 50% each are better because they prevent relying on a single peer being available when making payments, which can be problematic. They also suggested that combining multiple channels is straightforward and only requires the endpoints to know how to do it. Although it is true that users won't care about relaying other people's transactions, they may want to offset their own fees or earn something by acting as a nice neighbor, which can be achieved through multiple channels.Christian emphasized that there is no direct connection between UX and the number of channels. The underlying connections do not have to show up in the UX interface at all, especially if multi-path routes are allowed. While Anton plans to design their Android LN wallet UI and UX to support a single payment channel, Christian suggests not binding the single channel and the UX too tightly.