For those playing along at home, you'll no doubt note that (should my understanding be correct), BW consumption scales at O(n^2).
I'm sure it will improve when the routing invention breakthrough occurs.
Of course - the clueless developers! D'oh, what an unforgivable oversight! The system they implemented is doomed. They chose the SAN (Spam All Network) algorithm for both route discovery and node state update. They slept during their networking lessons, or was it calculus? So they failed to notice that bandwidth grows quadratically with the number of nodes. This way, it's almost as bad as if one increased the block size. But who would ever think of
that?
Hyperbole duly noted. Be that as it may, do you have any evidence that suggests that my understanding is incorrect?
Honestly, I don't know which solution has eventually been adopted in this first version of the LN, but already in 2016 the proposed method was significantly better than the naive SAN technique you hint at.
https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@emabfuri/bitfury-bitcoin-routing-lightning-network-solutionHere's a relevant excerpt.
Using a fog of war like design, the collected information by the routing algorithm “includes channels within a low hop-distance and paths to randomly selected nodes further away… As a result, a node will have a well-illuminated map of its local neighborhood within the network, with random patches of visibility further away enabled by the selection of beacon nodes.”
So, it's not an initially low TTL that gets conservatively increased as I had wildly imagined, but not so far off either: closer nodes are exhaustively enumerated, while a small set of distant nodes is selected pseudorandomly.
There is a more detailed pdf paper floating around. If you study it, a summary will be well received. I don't have the time or energy right now. If I get either or both, I'd rather actually test how LN works for me, with my own node.
http://bitfury.com/content/5-white-papers-research/whitepaper_flare_an_approach_to_routing_in_lightning_network_7_7_2016.pdfInb4 Fyookball - not to mean you would stoop that low, but just in case ;-)
https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-the-lightning-network-cannot-be-a-decentralized-bitcoin-scaling-solution-1b8147650800It's mostly BS with truth mixed in - the most dangerous form of BS.