For those of you that advocate for zero base fees: here is why you're wrong.
Discussion
What am I looking at?
Zero base fee should just make path finding faster to compute, you would still charge a ppm fee
I think what you're missing is that when the PPM value of the forward is below 1 sat, the sender effectively ducks the PPM. Zero base fees encourage spamming the network with 400+ small payments instead of sending a single payment for 600k. The sender only needs to have patience and the ability to write a 20 line bash script, where as compute time, unsettled HTLCs, worker exhaustion and high value liquidity are the cost to the operator.
They don't duck it, they pay in millisats which is the native unit on lightning... They won't do all that work to save 1 sat!
You're right. TIL: mSats accrue. Previously thought msats didn't accrue. Thanks for that.
Regardless base fees > 0 discourage this behavior. And it is not without irony. At the time that WoS channel had a large negative inbound fee and enough liquidity for their transactions, so they could have sent their ~500k sats in a single payment in seconds as opposed to hours and without consuming so much compute. They consumed almost 4 minutes (!) of compute over the span of ~12 hours, and this time period was accompanied with a forwarding fail rate that was almost +50% than the month's average.