Rene Pickhardt recently kicked off a thread discussing the differences between two party and multiparty (more than two participants) payment channels as it relates to his research work around payment reliability on the Lightning Network. He voices a growing skepticism of the viability of that direction for development.
The high level idea of why channel factories improve the reliability of payments comes down to liquidity allocation. In a network of only two party channels, users have to make zero sum choices on where to allocate their liquidity. This has a systemic effect on the overall success rate of payments across the network, if people put their liquidity somewhere it isn’t needed to process payments instead of where it is, payments will fail as the liquidity in places people need is used up (until it is rebalanced). This dynamic is simply one of the design constraints of the Lightning Network known from the very beginning, and why research like Rene’s is incred
We współpracy z: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/takes/shinobi-off-chain-protocols-will-always-be-a-balancing-act