Hi,
I know … yet another topic with the “damned” charge-lnd program.
the purpose here is to make my node and therefore the lightning network ( at my humble level) more efficient.
I have been running a node for almost 2 years. Doing lots of things manually thus learning some and i am happy about it. but time as come to spend less time on that part . Automatizing efficientlyis a way to achieve that.
i therefore looked into, tools and spent some time understanding charge-lnd. tried various configuration ( it can be tricky ), wrote a python program to analyse the outputs …
I fail to understand why charge-lnd is sometime diabolized. so i post this to understand . it might help others too i hope.
i aim to use charge-lnd to reduce failed HTLC + make my node naturally more balanced to better route to everyone ( not just big and draining nodes)
to reduce failed htlc the idea is to prevent routing tries that won’t go through anyway ( insufficient balance mostly ).
there are multiple way to achieve that. Here are some scenarios, which do you think is better for the node and lightning network ?
1- for the node without no outbound ( in my case less that 50K for example) you can do 3 things mostly :
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disable the channel on my side. so as no further tries will be made through it. having read some post in this forum, i allready hear loud yelling … i don’t see why it is a bad solution since it won’t route that way anyway. and, as soon as some funds get back another rule will apply thus enabling the channel again (that is how charge-lnd works) . i see no devil in that. tell me why it is bad.
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reduce max htlc to a very small amount ( say a tenth of the outbound left ? ). thus not preventing very small routing but still preventing bigger HTLC trials. i also read this might not be very secure/confidential …
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increase fees ( which one is better ? base or ppm ? ) quite a lot to make the routing algorithm not chose this route. although it will try anyway and waste a bit of energy on it.
i don’t know which one is more efficient for the network. any opinion ?
for channel with less than 5% i reduce max htlc to again 1/10 th of the left outbound. same question as above can apply beteween reducing max htlc ou increasing base or ppm fees.
and for the rest of them, i mainly use simple proportional rule that i adapt to 4 peer node size . that allow for helping small or medium sized nodes for example. it also helps the channels stay more balanced whithout the use of further tools that just generate internal traffic.
i ll be glad to get some insights on these questions
PS1 :i read charge-lnd will by itself disable none profitable channels ? that would of course be an issue if it starts doing things on its own. But i didn’t read that in their" fucking manual"… is it true ? bad configuration by users ? conspiracy talk ?
PS2 : are they more efficient tools ? ( lndg autofees ? others ?)