4 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
A possible approach to manipulating transaction routing paths would be to control many nodes and the interconnections between them. This would provide opportunities to *farm* third party nodes connecting to these centralized subnets, consolidating them on to restricted paths optimized based on their transaction patterns and utility for channel balancing. The illusion of decentralization established in this way could help to disguise abusive rent-seeking and adverse fee behaviors. Controlling signifiant portions of a node's route options would also give these operators deanonymization capabilities, desirable by everyone from traditional marketing firms and payment providers to law enforcement and intelligence services.
The more complexity that is hidden from the user, the more trust they must place in the correctness of the software and the less ability they have to detect abusive network behavior. Users seeking the least complex use-case - mostly offline wallet, high send to receive ratio, no third party transaction routing - are therefore *most at risk* of rent-seeking and other external abuses.
Comment by throckmortonsign at 22/12/2017 at 08:20 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Agreed they are. Which is true in almost every form of software, mechanical expertise, sports, and society in general. It "just works" always will come with the caveat that it could probably work better if you know what you're doing. That said, there are a variety of countermeasures which could be automated to prevent the attack you describe and will likely only get better as the science progresses. It's always a cat and mouse game, though.