Proposal for Simplifying Lightning Channel Closures

I’m really not into the latest Bitcoin opcodes, but here’s my thought: What if we had a hard-fork to make closing Lightning channels more predictable? Right now, when you open a channel, you have no idea what the fees for closing it will be. What if a block was published that’s a bit smaller than the 1 MB limit, allowing future blocks to exceed that limit? Just a thought.

But wait a second. Blocks have been over 1 MB for a while now, so why is this a thing? Miners can totally publish smaller blocks if they want, so I see some potential issues with this. Like, couldn’t a bad actor just reserve a ton of block space when fees are low and then dump it all at once later? Sounds risky.

That’s an interesting point. I actually think it’s a cool idea. Like, it’s sort of like reserving future block space. And it could be used for more than just Lightning channels. But yeah, there’s a catch. When fees are low, someone could hoard all that space. Exchanges might exploit this for their future transactions.

I kinda get where you’re coming from, but I’m not on board with this idea. First, it’s a hard-fork, and I doubt the Bitcoin community would back it. Plus, adding more complexity to the protocol isn’t the way to go. I’d rather see improvements in how LN handles variable TX fees.

Valid point, but what if we look at the huge block issue differently? Sure, we could tweak the protocol to handle reservations in a limited way, like setting timeframes or limiting the number of reserve transactions per block. But that complicates everything. Maybe there’s a simpler way to reimagine this reservation concept.

Better, but if there’s no fee competition, why would miners care? No fee means no reason to include those transactions, right?

I think you misunderstood. My take is that there should still be fee competition. If redeem transaction space is limited, they’ll have to compete for it. Even with unlimited space, users need to pay fees; otherwise, miners won’t include them. So with limited space, there’d actually be times where competition really pays off for miners. OP said these transactions are basically free money for them, so they’ll take them even with low fees.