Oddbean new post about login | logout Yep, you are right. The affect isnt neccessarily unbalancing. But every transaction does affect other's channel balances. So, is there a way to determine, when doing this, if the transaction will be a net positive to the network?
Technically you fix one side 🤣, and mess up another channel somewhere else. You could by chance fix another channel. Its just everyone rebelling all the time 😅
You fix at a minimum two sides. Think about this. I have a channel with you. You have 0.1 BTC, I have 0.9 BTC. I rebalance through you. You now have 0.5 BTC in your side of the channel, and I have 0.5 BTC in my side. Your side of the channel, and my side of the channel, are both now in balance. What’s even better is when I do it really efficiently and find another peer who had 0.1 BTC on their side of the channel too. If I use them as the destination channel, I can make their balance 0.5 too, and now all three of us are balanced. Sure, there might be hops along the way which I cannot see beforehand which may become unbalanced. But they charged me a fee to route through them, just like they would for a normal payment. If that fee isn’t worth their trouble or supposed “risk”, they can raise it or make their channel non-routing.
“Net positive to the network” isn’t the way that I think about it. People need to act based on their own incentive structures. This isn’t going to work if we need to rely on altruism to effectively route payments and balance channels. If you don’t want your channel to be part of my circular rebalance, perfect. Don’t let people route through your channel then. Make it a private channel which doesn’t support routing and isn’t part of my graph. There’s no other way to prevent circular rebalancing behavior from occurring because it’s fundamentally no different than routing a normal payment. If you do want your channel to be part of my circular rebalance, that’s also perfect. Set your fee rate, and I’ll decide whether it’s worth it for me to pay you to preform that service for me. That’s a free market for routing and fee collection; and that’s a model which can win.