As pointed out by many lightning developers in the past (e.g. Rusty's 1 million channel challenge) the gossip protocol is quite noisy and a part of the BOLTs causing many engineering challenges.
Today, I learned that Ethereum's Raiden network does not have a gossip protocol. Since all channels in Raiden are smart contracts that live in the Ethereum blockchain, Raiden nodes are supposed to learn about the network topology by looking at the Ethereum blockchain.
I believe funding transactions could have been designed to store information about Lightning nodes. Why was that not done?
Reasons I see:
- With our design we can have private channels
- blockspace is valuable, so we did not want to store more info on chain than necessary
- we needed a transport and communication protocol between nodes anyway, so why not add the Gossip protocol?
My feeling is that there must have been other reasons for that design decision. So what am I missing?