A unified policy differs between local channels and other channels on
the network. There is more information available for local channels and
this is used in the unified policy.
Previously we used the pathfinding source pubkey to determine whether to
apply the local channel logic or not. If queryroutes is executed with a
source node that isn't the self node, this wouldn't work.
When the (virtual) payment attempt cost is set to zero, probabilities
are no longer a factor in determining the best route. In case of routes
with equal costs, we'd just go with the first one found. This commit
refines this behavior by picking the route with the highest probability.
So even though probability doesn't affect the route cost, it is still
used as a tie breaker.
This prepares for routing to self. When checking the condition at the
start, the loop would terminate immediately because the source is equal
to the target.
This commit modifies the FetchPayment method to return MPPayment structs
converted from the legacy on-disk format. This allows us to attach the
HTLCs to the events given to clients subscribing to the outcome of an
HTLC.
This commit also bubbles up to the routerrpc/router_server, by
populating HTLCAttempts in the response and extracting the legacy route
field from the HTLCAttempts.
Previously we used the a priori probability also for our own untried
channels. This led to local channels that had seen a success already
being prioritized over untried local channels. In some cases, depending
on the configured payment attempt cost, this could lead to the payment
taking a two hop route while a direct payment was also possible.
An InvalidOnionPayload implies that the onion was successfully received
by the reporting node, but that they were unable to extract the
contents. Since we assume our own behavior is correct, this mostly
likely poins to an error in the reporter's implementation or that we
sent an unknown required type. Therefore we only penalize that single
hop, and consider the failure terminal if the receiver reported it.
Probabilities are no longer returned for querymc calls. To still provide
some insight into the mission control internals, this commit adds a new
rpc that calculates a success probability estimate for a specific node
pair and amount.
This prepares for decoupling the result interpretation of a single
payment attempt from the information stored in mission control memory
on the history of a node pair. A planned follow-up where we store both
the last success and last failure requires this decoupling.
In this commit we change path finding to no longer consider all channels
between a pair of nodes individually. We assume that nodes forward
non-strict and when we attempt a connection between two nodes, we don't
want to try multiple channels because their policies may not be identical.
Having distinct policies for channel to the same peer is against the
recommendation in the spec, but it happens in the wild. Especially since
we recently changed the default cltv delta value.
What this commit introduces is a unified policy. This can be looked upon
as the greatest common denominator of all policies and should maximize
the probability of getting the payment forwarded.
