lightning-dev

In-protocol liquidity probing and channel jamming mitigation

In-protocol liquidity probing and channel jamming mitigation

Original Postby Owen Gunden

Posted on: October 15, 2021 13:55 UTC

In an email thread, Joost Jager proposed a combination of two proposals to address the issue of upfront fees for Lightning Network transactions.

The first proposal is to make probing free with no liquidity locked up, and the second is to require senders to pay for failed payment attempts. The idea is that failed payment attempts after a successful probe should be rare and this would fix the user experience issue with upfront fees. However, a concern was raised about the possibility of a malicious routing node or group of nodes succeeding in the probe and then deliberately failing the payment in order to collect the failed payment fee.