The Lightning Network has made a huge improvement in performance over the past year, serving micropayments --> everyday payments.
This is a combination of improvements in network topology and asset appreciation vs the unit of account ($).
Discussion
It's a solid improvement, buuut <80% reliability for 100$ it's just not good enough.
i do this size of transaction about 2x a week, never had one failure, so this percentage metric is probably not accurate
I think Amboss is a lightning data aggregator. Therefore they might come across some "I run my lightning node on a raspberry pi with a channel of 100$" operators that skew the metrics idk
yeah, i'm sure darthcoin would have a few 🤬 words about this
also, this data needs to not be including private channels, at all, private channel and shitty domestic network connection in some country with government monopoly controlled internet = unreliable
this all relates to stuff i've said about how i think we can solve the network intelligence problem of lightning
1. channels should be advertising their balance as a single bit, meaning one side is up = true, if balance is other side, then false
2. channels should advertise a single value indicating the range of their total size, like, each number of that value represents let's say 20000 sats, so 50 means 1Msats, or maybe make it powers of 2 so each additional bit is 2x as much as the previous, so 2 means up to 40ksat, 20 means 2^20*20ksat (idk, if i sat down and thought about a good scale i could do it, but in general 100k is minimal channel, mainly because average payment is somewhere around 20ksat, so yeah
you cound wrap it into a single 8 bit value, or 2 hex chars, and make it a signed integer so it gives you both direction and size range
it would be voluntary, you can send nothing, but clients constructing payment routes could decline to use them for this case, and this would allow a lot of avoiding of shit small channels, which likely is what contributes to this 20% failure rate
This feature exists in Thunderhub and can displayed as mostly local vs Mostly remote or mostly balanced. It's up to the user what to the share to the Amboss API. Our pathfinding API will use the information provided with high certainty, so the users that share this information will get suggested for routing more often.
This is network average, so this is definitely skewed by hobbyist operators.