lightning-dev

Hold fees: 402 Payment Required for Lightning itself

Hold fees: 402 Payment Required for Lightning itself

Original Postby Bastien TEINTURIER

Posted on: November 2, 2020 14:33 UTC

The proposal suggests that an htlc received by a routing node has certain properties, including the htlc amount, forward up-front payment (anti-spam), backward up-front payment (anti-hold), and grace period.

The routing node forwards this to the next hop with lower htlc amount, lower forward up-front payment, higher backward up-front payment, and shorter grace period. However, there is an issue related to trustless offchain-to-onchain swaps, where the swap service will generally be forced to pay up the hold fees as claiming the offchain side is dependent on claiming of the onchain side of the trustless swap mechanism which is slow. The hold-fees mechanism cannot be ported over in the onchain side, so the swap service would need to issue a separate invoice to pay for the hold fee for the "real" swap payment. To mitigate against this, a combined mining-fee+hold-fee invoice would have to be issued at the same time as the "real" swap invoice.