are there any good articles on LN's decrementing timelocks

[jonald_fyookball]

Having perused the LN whitepaper, what I gather is that the 'everyone doesn't have to open a channel with everyone else' problem is solved by these decrementing timelocks where bitcoin is sort of passed along between various microchannels. 

Are there any good guides to explain more about this?

[praxeology]

I just talked to gmaxwell about this.

He said something like: you can specify relative lock time in a transaction.  So lets say you make a transaction where it can't be included in the block until 10,000 blocks after its newest input.

Then you increment the transaction's sequence number and change the lock to 9,000 and say adjust the amount sent.
Then you ** 8,000 and adjust the amount sent again.
Then you ** 7,000 **.

Block candidate producers (miners) would then be very likely to include the first available transaction that becomes unlocked... so that a particular block producer can gain the benefit of the tx fee instead of some other producer say 1000 blocks from now w/ the previous sequence number.  Also, in general, entities prefer attaining ownership of more durable money/resources earlier rather than later, all else being equal.

With Child Pays For Parent, or other methods, even the recipient could motivate miners to include the transaction with the shortest lock time.

Such an explanation satisfied all of my questions.  Do you need more or are you now satisfied too?

Cheers,
Praxeology

[jonald_fyookball]

thanks praxeology.

No, I am still confused.  This is rather new territory (at least for me).

Let me start with a more basic question:  If Alice is trying to send funds to Dave,
via:

Alice -> Bob -> Carol -> Dave,

Do Bob and Carol need to actively permission this, or is this supposed to be automatic
as a property of how the LN operates?

thanks.

[stdset]

I recommend this series of articles, by Aaron van Wirdum.

[Quickseller]

Let me start with a more basic question:  If Alice is trying to send funds to Dave,
via:

Alice -> Bob -> Carol -> Dave,

Do Bob and Carol need to actively permission this, or is this supposed to be automatic
as a property of how the LN operates?.

Bob and Carol would need to actively permission this, and each of them would likely charge a fee for going through their open channels. A likely setup would be that both Bob and Carol somehow advertise/broadcast this service, and keep their LN node running, along with their private keys to facilitate this via automation.....in other words keep their money on an online computer.

Block candidate producers (miners) would then be very likely to include the first available transaction that becomes unlocked...

I think it would make more sense if the miners included transactions that pay the highest tx fee rate that are valid. I am not aware of any incentives for the miners to include a transaction immidiately after (relative) time locks expire, nor when a transaction is first seen by the miner.

[jonald_fyookball]

great set of articles, i understand it much better now.

Yes, Bob must give permission to be used as intermediary between Alice and Carol but most likely the first implementations won't bother with that, they will be simple hub and spoke models as it is simpler and more profitable...in the farther future, smart directories and smart wallets can use the full implications in the paper.