Am I correct in assuming that for-profit Lightning channels need to be “cleaned” on a regular basis?
Let’s say there are three people/nodes: Tom, Jack, and Bob. Tom wants to send 50 satoshis to Bob. Tom has a channel with Jack with a capacity of 1000 sats (the multi-signature transaction involves Tom’s 1000 sats and Jack’s 0 sats). Jack also has a channel with Bob, with Jack consuming 1000 sats and Bob consuming 0 sats. Since Bob is the owner of the coffee, we assume that he does not send money to Tom because Tom is his customer. Now Tom buys coffee every day for a while and pays for it through Jack. Because both Jack and Tom only send money in one direction, they eventually reach a point where they both run out of capacity. Since each hop channel must be able to handle an entire transaction (which means the channel requires a combined capacity of number_of_hops*money_to_be_sent), the channel will eventually become useless. This means that both of them now have to empty the useless channel (submitting the two final commitments to the blockchain), which incurs Bitcoin on-chain transaction costs for both of them (the amount that both of them had to pay to open it) (in addition to transaction costs) channels). If Jack’s routing fee exceeds the Bitcoin transaction cost, he will make a profit, but for Tom, this is a complete loss. Is this all right?