Quote from: BitCryptex on August 30, 2019, 07:52:40 PM

Unless the vast majority of LN users exclude or lower the priority of large HUBs, it won't make that much of a difference. It's kind of 'vote with your wallet'.

I agree, but smaller operators of nodes might only ever number in the 10's of thousands. I hope there will be more, but who knows. Simply by discussing this, it could eventually reach the eyeballs those 10's of thousands while they (inevitably) look for ways to improve their node's competitiveness.

Quote from: BitCryptex on August 30, 2019, 07:52:40 PM

It looks like LND allows to ignore certain nodes while querying possible routes (ignored_nodes parameter). The outputs can be used in SendToRoute, so it's already possible to do what you suggested manually using LND. SendPayment does not have such feature but it is possible to select the first node which will route the payment.

this is useful information.

I still think that the 'sybil'¹ problem exists. And so what of a "route through this node, if we can" type of routing logic? Has anyone implemented that? What problems could it cause?

A problem with the "avoid this route" routing logic is that, depending on how many nodes are circumvented, the routing calculation will likely increase in time and complexity, and possibly also fee amount. This problem depends a great deal on the precise network topography and it's liquidity distribution, but certainly the worst case will be affected.

¹(it's not really the proper definiton of sybil, as it's not an attack on the connectivity or topography of the network)