Thread: On average, each Facebook user is connected to any …

This is why the Lightning network always fail. And, with greater scale, the problem becomes far worse.

But also, if any other user on Facebook uses one of the links you want to use, the number of characters available to message with changes.

Now, imagine you were charged a little bit for every time you clicked to another person.

And that any message you want to send to me have to go through that chain of people you find.

To overcome the problem as it is structured here, you have to have a map of the connections available. You need to know who is friends with who, and how many characters each link can support.

This is an information problem.

And, having that information necessarily harms people's privacy.

Why should you know who I'm connected to, and how much money I have available in each connection?

How hard do you think it would be to route your message to me now?

Now, count how many times you click through to another person before you find me.

I'd be willing to bet you'll be lucky to find me in less than 10 people.

But now, Arby's has a hell of a lot of power in this network, and they can engage in rent seeking behaviors, charging more than the market rate because they're highly connected.

And imagine that each link in the chain has a limit on how many characters your message can contain.

So you have to find a path to me with enough character bandwidth to support your message.

The only way to solve that is to have everyone connect through certain influencers.

If I follow Arby's on Facebook, and almost everyone else follows Arby's too, then you can probably get to me through Arby's.

In other words, just use Bitcoin.

Going through Arby's lessens your information problem. So, you pay. But then Arby's gets more powerful every time.

With very little work, they gain profits.

There is no "ideal" solution to any of this... Except to eliminate the routing problem altogether.

How does one do that?

Allow messages to be sent to anyone, because channels aren't the backbone of the network.