Background

When a node has multiple private channels with the same peer, the hop hints in their payment requests will be populated with multiple channels. The purpose of these hop hints is to specify the next node's key and indicate the fees and cltv delta needed for route construction.

In pathfinding, due to non-strict forwarding, an LND node paying to this destination will only use the maximal policy values across these multiple hinted channels.

Since it only uses the maximal policy values in order to be an acceptable forward over any channel, the creator of the invoice may as well save some space in the payment request by pre-calculating the maximal policy values and compressing multiple private channels with the same peer into a single set of edge policy values

Your environment

• LND 0.11.0-beta.rc2

Steps to reproduce

• Create multiple private channels to a peer
• Add a new invoice that includes private channel hop hints

Expected behavior

• Hop hints should only include a single pairwise hint

Actual behavior

• Hop hints includes the entire set of private channels