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Right, the benefit comes from reusing opened payment channels. A key thing to know is that payment channels can be used transitively: if Alice and Bob have an o
by AgentME 9y ago
Right, the benefit comes from reusing opened payment channels. A key thing to know is that payment channels can be used transitively: if Alice and Bob have an open channel, and Bob and Charlie also have an open channel, then Alice can send a payment through the connections to Charlie without any risk of Bob stealing the money. If many people keep open connections to a couple people each, then it becomes ridiculously likely that a path could be found through already-open payment channels between any two participants.
- rtkwe 9y agoBut also each channel has to have the total amount being sent precommited in the initial channel opening so in your example if Alice want's to send Charlie 1 BTC the balance in both the A-B and B-C channels has to be at least 1 BTC. Which kind of demands some pretty central clearing hubs in the lightning network that will need a large amount of BTC locked into these channels.