
Flare: An Approach to Routing in Lightning Network (2016) [pdf] - xwvvvvwx
http://bitfury.com/content/downloads/whitepaper_flare_an_approach_to_routing_in_lightning_network_7_7_2016.pdf
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foepys
It's such a joke that the actual payment routing is only discussed in a 13
line paragraph in the Lightning Network whitepaper (section 8.4) [1]. Routing
is the actual real-world problem that is in need to be solved before LN could
be considered working. Instead, the whitepaper states:

> It is theoretically possible to build a route map implicitly from observing
> 2-of-2 multisigs on the blockchain to build a routing table. [...] Node
> discovery can occur along the edges by pre-selecting and offering partial
> routes to well-known nodes.

That's it. The word "routing" also only appears _once_ outside of that
section.

There are several proposals that all eventually end in "use payment hubs with
high liquidity", which are just the equivalent of banks. It doesn't solve any
of the problems that the Bitcoin crowd wanted to solve in the first place:
Fees will still exist as nobody will altruistically commit thousands of
Bitcoin into thousands of LN channels, decentralization is out of the window,
and anonymity (or rather pseudonymity) will be easily reversed due to the need
for long lasting LN channels to make efficient use of the LN.

All of the above is not even considering that you need to commit a large
amount of Bitcoin into LN channels to be able to make use of LN's advantages
(not waiting for block confirmations) effectively - which you have to
constantly monitor to not lose your channel contents.

LN is an interesting technological experiment but it has no practical uses
outside of test environments due to the limitations I laid out above.

1: [https://lightning.network/lightning-network-
paper.pdf](https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf)

~~~
wraithm112
The TCP and IP protocol specifications do not mention routing either. There
are many routing algorithms possible, and many of them are used
simultaneously. The same will be true for the lightning network. Lighting has
a long way to go, but writing it off as a cute but useless experiment because
of current limitations is short sighted.

~~~
CryptoPunk
TCP/IP based networks don't have rapidly changing topographies. A payment
channel network's topography changes every time it processes a transaction,
because it changes the amounts available for transferring in the channels that
transaction was routed through.

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bufferoverflow
I've read a lot about LN routing in the last year, and I still don't get what
the plan is. Since it's the responsibility of each client to route its
payment, you now put yourself in a situation where each client must know the
state of the network - maybe not the whole network, but enough to get to the
destination. We didn't even get to the routing, and already this is a huge
problem. That O(n^2), and will not scale. How do you expect everyone to know
the state of millions of channels, where the state changes thousands of times
per second.

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lgierth
Note this is nearly 2 years old already, and the Lightning work is still
ongoing. It'd be really interesting to see where this Flare proposal went, and
whether there are more routing proposals.

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CyberDildonics
The lightning network is a solution in search of a problem. Every other
cryptocurrency has no problem scaling. Btc is artificially limited to 1MB
every 10 minutes. Bitcoin cash is upgrading to a 32MB block limit right now.
Bigger blocks and multiple chains mean this is essentially not an issue for
many years to come, all it takes is not using btc.

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ddtaylor
How does LN do routing currently? Why does it fail so often?

