Proposal: Resizing Lightning Channels Off-Chain With Hierarchical Channels
"It's hoped that hierarchical channels will eventually be adopted in BOLTs and implemented in order to improve the scalability, efficiency, and usability of the Lightning network."
- Dynamic management of Lightning channel capacity is required to support efficient Lightning Network (LN) payments.
- On-chain resizing introduces delays, adds costs and limits scalability.
- Fast and cheap resizing may be required to support watchtower-free LN payments for casual users.
- Channel factories allow off-chain channel resizing, but only by exchanging capacity within a single factory. - Hierarchical channels allow flexible, off-chain resizing of channels.
- They don't require an exchange of capacity within a limited pool of users.
- They also support watchtower-free casual users without stranding any channel capacity. - Hierarchical channels do for channel capacity what the LN does for bitcoin.
- No change to the underlying Bitcoin protocol is required.
