I guess we need to define what we mean when we say "hub"


"hub" to me would mean the nodes with the most disproportionately high liquidity on the network. by that definition, not everyone can be a hub (let's for argument's sake say the top 20 highest liquidity nodes are hubs).

does that mean a literal hub & spoke network topology will form around these nodes? the answer to that so far is "no" (despite rather hilarious attempts by trolls to post screenshots of lightning network topography depicting uncountable numbers of connections going between huge quantities of small nodes). it's a fact that the network graph is massively complex even at this early stage; if you took an isolated view of big liquidity providers, a hub and spoke topography is evident. but there are far more regions within the network graph where smaller nodes are connected to one another than those dominated by hubs.

the purpose of this thread is to kick around some ideas to encourage the continuation of that. as has been said, in an open access system, there's nothing to stop someone providing more liquidity than others as they see fit, and also nothing to stop someone spreading their liquidity across several nodes to obscure shared ownership.


so maybe here's another way of looking at the same thing:

if you were a big liquidity provider on LN, and wanted to dominate the network, how would you do it? using multiple smaller nodes is one obvious way, but this pushes your costs up in a marketplace that's easy to join. and the network topography is constantly changing, a position in the network graph might become less relevant frustratingly quickly.

• might competitiveness be found by over provisioning node/channel count, keep the majority nearly empty, connecting them all together, then re-balancing liquidity to where it's needed, or where it is somehow predicted to arise?
• could wannabe hubs over-provide liquidity massively and simultaneously undercut fees of smaller nodes, hoping that doing so for long enough will push them out of the market?
• perhaps some exclusivity deals with large businesses using Lightning?
• or exclusivity through deals with financial regulators?
• using a strategy for causing valid routing to fail, where they make some trade-off that failing at one node within a route has an increased likelihood that a recalculated route will use more of their nodes?

how else could someone try to be dominate LN? any objections/solutions to the above?