Repository navigation
Say what a node operator decides, and whether cheapest is the real answer - #17
Merged
Merged
Conversation
…swer Two questions the routing quest raised without answering. The first is who chooses the hops. The curriculum said route selection happens in the sender's wallet and left it there, which invites the reasonable inference that running a node means picking paths. It does not. Three roles, three answers: paying, your software chooses and never asks you; forwarding, you cannot choose to be on a route at all and can only advertise terms and wait; being paid, you can hint through routing hints and blinded paths but not choose. What actually needs judgment is channels, decided once and lasting months, not routes, decided in a moment and never surfaced. The second is whether the cheapest path is what you get. Automatically, yes. Cheapest, roughly, and BOLT #7 is unusually candid about why not: fee and cltv_expiry_delta both matter and "the relationship between these two attributes is unclear, as it depends on the reliability of the nodes involved". It then recommends two things that cost more on purpose, a shadow route to stop hops inferring their distance from the recipient, and diversification to avoid depending on any single node. Real wallets add failure memory, liquidity guesses, a configurable fee ceiling and retries on top, so the route you pay through is the first one that worked rather than the first one costed. Three more entries in the question index point at both stops. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This file contains hidden or bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below. To review, open the file in an editor that reveals hidden Unicode characters.
Learn more about bidirectional Unicode characters
Sign up for free
to join this conversation on GitHub.
Already have an account?
Sign in to comment
1 participant
Add this suggestion to a batch that can be applied as a single commit.This suggestion is invalid because no changes were made to the code.Suggestions cannot be applied while the pull request is closed.Suggestions cannot be applied while viewing a subset of changes.Only one suggestion per line can be applied in a batch.Add this suggestion to a batch that can be applied as a single commit.Applying suggestions on deleted lines is not supported.You must change the existing code in this line in order to create a valid suggestion.Outdated suggestions cannot be applied.This suggestion has been applied or marked resolved.Suggestions cannot be applied from pending reviews.Suggestions cannot be applied on multi-line comments.Suggestions cannot be applied while the pull request is queued to merge.Suggestion cannot be applied right now. Please check back later.
Two questions the routing quest raised without answering.
Who chooses the hops
The curriculum said route selection happens in the sender's wallet and left it there, which invites the reasonable inference that running a node means picking paths. It doesn't.
What actually needs judgment is channels, decided once and lasting months, not routes, decided in a moment and never surfaced.
Is it really the cheapest?
Automatically, yes. Cheapest, roughly, and BOLT #7 is unusually candid about why not. Fee and
cltv_expiry_deltaboth matter, and:The spec is telling implementers there's no formula, because the missing input is how trustworthy a stranger is. It then recommends two things that cost more on purpose: a shadow route so hops can't infer their distance from the recipient (Quest #5's privacy argument, paid for in a worse route), and diversification to avoid depending on any single node.
Real wallets add failure memory, liquidity guesses, a configurable fee ceiling and retries on top, so the route you pay through is the first one that worked, not the first one costed.
Also
Three more entries in the question index pointing at both stops. New excerpt verified verbatim against the pinned spec (5/5 lines).
147 tests green; lint, build, typecheck clean; no em dashes.
🤖 Generated with Claude Code