Rather than use gossip to share liquidity info, another potential solution which I briefly describe in this post is to add a query message to get path(s) from a peer.
- This improves the likelihood of successful payment because each hop can inform the requester of a feasible outbound channel set without revealing any of their channel balances.
- Depending on implementation, this potentially allows nodes to change their routing policies (e.g fees) on a per transaction basic, which improves their control over liquidity flow.
Of course, this approach has a lot of implications, so I want to create follow-up on my previous post with details regarding an implementation and a cost/benefit analysis, but I think it’s actually a relatively simple way to solve a lot of existing problems.