The post Payment Splitting And Switching: Improving Privacy And Payment Success Simultaneously appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

One of the fundamental limitations of the Lightning protocol is how payment routing is handled and accomplished. It is entirely source routed, meaning that the sender of a payment is the one who constructs the entire route from themselves to the receiver in order to facilitate the payment. This presents an issue when it comes to the changing balances of channels over time as they are routing payments between numerous different users across the network, once a sender “locks in” and decides on a specific route, that route cannot be changed until a failure message makes it way back to the sender, allowing them to construct an entirely new route going around the point where the initial attempt failed. This necessitates either dealing with a cumbersome and annoying UX, or the use of payment probing, intentionally crafting payments you will fail on purpose just to see if the route you want to use will work before attempting again with the actual payment. The former is just a bad user experience and not what you want when trying to craft something to be a viable payment solution for people at scale, and the latter puts an undue burden on the network as a whole as routing nodes must deal with the network traffic and liquidity complications of constant payments made with no intent to finalize just to test the viability of a route. The ultimate cause of these problems is the inability of a route to change mid-payment without the involvement of the sender. Because the entire payment route is onion encrypted, this is not really possible to do. Each hop is only aware of the hop before it, and the hop after it, they have no knowledge of the ultimate destination to enable them to construct an alternate route from…

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Filed under: News - @ October 25, 2023 5:20 pm