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There is no way to implement routing in lightning. Literally nobody knows how to do it. It is a studied problem, and nobody has a solution. Nobody knows where to start looking for a solution.

It doesn't matter how much is fixed or tweaked in the code, it won't help. We don't know how to solve routing in Lightning. It's just not a tractable problem.



Care to elaborate exactly what you mean by that? Routing seems to work well for me at least


It works now, because the network is tiny, the number of transactions are low, and the implementation uses a dumb brute force approach.

That approach does not scale, at all. If Lightning were ever to grow beyond a toy network, it would completely collapse.


I would be very curious to learn more about this - do you have any sources for it or links to conversations around it?

(It's not commonly recognized and impossible to talk about without any pointers as to where the problem should lie)


Here's one quick simplified explanation of the issues: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/97qg8l/can_someone_exp...


Thanks. This I'm somewhat familiar with, it's a theoretical fundamental issue in any decentralized and distributed routing network so applies for any interesting L2 solution.

In practice this needn't be an issue:

* Most nodes will rebalance, open and closed channels based on neighbour uptime and reliability

* In practice the LN network is expected to have a little but of a hub-and-spokes topology. So in practice you will almost always have a couple of well-known highly connected peers along your route

So it's a fundamental issue that will become a reality in worst-case scenarios but something that can be mitigated.

As one of the comments noted, we're somehow able to do this for TCP and TOR.

You linking to the /btc subreddit makes me think nothing anyone says or any developments will ever convince you (correct me if I'm wrong). In that case, I think your efforts are better spent in focusing on bringing value to the efforts you do believe in rather than telling others they're bound to fail.




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