Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Earning LN routing fees
by
buwaytress
on 18/06/2018, 08:13:16 UTC
Running nodes isn't free, so i think fees in LN is totally acceptable. But IMO, there should be soft-limit such as less than 1% of transacted amount/less than 100 satoshi and default fees should be set to 0.

Some wallets, for example, Eclair for Android allow you to automatically block your payment if the fee exceeds 3% of the amount you want to pay. It is quite useful but it usually warned me when I was trying to send less than 1 cent worth of Bitcoin (testing Yalls.org). I had to turn it off in the settings in order to send the payment successfully. I wouldn't have such problem if I had opened a channel directly to Yalls. Wallets should be the ones to limit the fee, not the protocol.

Running nodes have never been free, and I'm sure the hundreds of volunteer nodes securing Bitcoin (and hundreds of others securing other alternative blockchains) know this - but incentive mechanisms are already in place... I'm also quite against protocol limiting the fee (yeah, default should be zero), when that function can easily be integrated into wallets. Then again, nature of competition and business efficiency should play all this out naturally. As will the price of Bitcoin, at some point.