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In Lightning, the sender can never be sure that a multi-hop payment will go through, as intermediary nodes don't announce the distribution of funds in their channels (only the total capacity). Is there any publicly available data on how many attempts it takes on average in practice to route payments of different sizes? Something like this (the numbers are my wild guess):
Amount - Average paths tried
100 sat - 1.8
1000 sat - 3.3
10000 sat - 5.9
1000000 sat - 13.2
There is a similar question Lightning network routing failure rate and a 2018 article linked from there, but it addresses the success probabilities based on capacities only (this can be calculated from a network snapshot). I'm interested on the data from real-world transactions.
3It seems to me that a ‘generalized network average’ will not be extremely useful, as I’d expect the standard deviation to be very large. That said, I do think this is a measure that could be meaningful, but it would need to be standardized against the liquidity of your channels and of your neighbouring peers, or something along those lines. Is there a term for the quantification of a LN node’s liquidity within the network graph? Affluence? Ha. Good question, anyways. – chytrik – 2019-10-10T22:13:07.443
I suggest to create histograms or a box plot. While not a single measure like a (generalized) average it will still be easy to read and probably as expressive as it gets – Rene Pickhardt – 2019-10-11T15:21:44.653