it's brittle, not fragile, the robustness comes from the size of the network
individual channels are brittle, meaning they have a sharp point between working and broken
Discussion
force closes everywhere. I'm not native speaker, you may be right
lightning's source routed model is inherently brittle
i spent last year working on turning this into a network relay protocol like tor... the only solution i could figure out for solving the brittleness problem was by using a similar idea as Atomic Multi Path AMP lightning sends, which are not yet well supported
they basically send the message over several paths at the same time, so they cost a lot more in bandwidth but it's a further step beyond AMPs because AMPs split just to reduce the size of each payment along their respective paths
the equivalent in LN would be where you make the same payment several times and whichever one wins the rest are ignored, but based on the current protocol that would be hard to enforce if two paths win for the receiver to not claim all successful paths
but for data routing it doesn't matter, of course, job done, even if two out of 3 got through that's better than zero out of 3
Oh my, I understand.
But what we're gonna do about sending 10k stas. It failed. and may be a week later you get a close.
yep, that is very annoying, at least it wasn't 500k like happened to me once with #breez and why i shit-talk about breez all the time
i think i tried to get a job with them before that... shame they didn't take me up on it because i spent two years digging into btcd codebase, same programmers who wrote LND which is one of the biggest causes causes of LN's brittleness
oh, they support AMP, but almost nobody uses it, and actually it's just a path composition algorithm the nodes in the path don't give a shit they just unwrap their piece, decode, take the sats, and forward it on
AMP and Keysend are two elements of the protocol that don't get nearly as much effort as they deserve to considering they solve most of the problems of the protocol except for adding redundancy
not to mention that base fees are making it way more infeasible