<oembed><type>rich</type><version>1.0</version><author_name>npub1aslmpzentw224n3s6yccru4dq2qdlx7rfudfnqevfck637cjt6esswfqmx</author_name><author_url>https://nostr.ae/npub1aslmpzentw224n3s6yccru4dq2qdlx7rfudfnqevfck637cjt6esswfqmx</author_url><provider_name>njump</provider_name><provider_url>https://nostr.ae</provider_url><html>📅 Original date posted:2020-10-13&#xA;📝 Original message:&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt; &gt; A crucial thing is that these hold fees don&#39;t need to be symmetric. A new&#xA;&gt; &gt; node for example that opens a channel to a well-known, established&#xA;&gt; routing&#xA;&gt; &gt; node will be forced to pay a hold fee, but won&#39;t see any traffic coming&#xA;&gt; in&#xA;&gt; &gt; anymore if it announces a hold fee itself. Nodes will need to build a&#xA;&gt; &gt; reputation before they&#39;re able to command hold fees. Similarly, routing&#xA;&gt; &gt; nodes that have a strong relation may decide to not charge hold fees to&#xA;&gt; &gt; each other at all.&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt; I can still establish channels to various low-reputation nodes, and then&#xA;&gt; use them to grief a high-reputation node.  Not only do I get to jam up&#xA;&gt; the high-reputation channels, as a bonus I get the low-reputation nodes&#xA;&gt; to pay for it!&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&#xA;So you&#39;re saying:&#xA;&#xA;ATTACKER --(no hold fee)--&gt; LOW-REP --(hold fee)--&gt; HIGH-REP&#xA;&#xA;If I were LOW-REP, I&#39;d still charge an unknown node a hold fee. I would&#xA;only waive the hold fee for high-reputation nodes. In that case, the&#xA;attacker is still paying for the attack. I may be forced to take a small&#xA;loss on the difference, but at least the larger part of the pain is felt by&#xA;the attacker. The assumption is that this is sufficient enough to deter the&#xA;attacker from even trying.&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&gt; Operators of high reputation nodes can even make this profitable; doubly&#xA;&gt; so, since they eliminate the chance of any of those low-reputation nodes&#xA;&gt; every getting to be high reputation (and thus competing).&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&gt; AFAICT any scheme which penalizes the direct peer creates a bias against&#xA;&gt; forwarding unknown payments, thus is deanonymizing.&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&#xA;If you&#39;re an honest but unknown sender (initiating the payment) and you&#xA;just pay the hold fee, I don&#39;t think there is a problem? The unknown&#xA;forward will still be carried out by a high-rep node. Also need to keep in&#xA;mind that the hold fee for quick happy flow payments is going to be tiny&#xA;(for example when calculating back from a desired annual return on the&#xA;staked channel capacity). And we can finally make these parasitic hodl&#xA;invoice users pay for it!&#xA;&#xA;I guess your concern is with trying to become a routing node? If nobody&#xA;knows you, you&#39;ll be forced to pay hold fees but can&#39;t attract traffic if&#xA;you charge hold fees yourself. That indeed means that you&#39;ll need to be&#xA;selective with whom you accept htlcs from. Put limits in place to control&#xA;the expenditure. Successful forwards will earn a routing fee which could&#xA;compensate for the loss in hold fees too.&#xA;&#xA;I think this mechanism can create interesting dynamics on the network and&#xA;eventually reach an equilibrium that is still healthy in terms of&#xA;decentralization and privacy.&#xA;&#xA;Joost&#xA;-------------- next part --------------&#xA;An HTML attachment was scrubbed...&#xA;URL: &lt;http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/attachments/20201013/aede1d83/attachment.html&gt;</html></oembed>