Option to exclude specified channels from payment routing

[billygarrison]

I don't think there's a way to do this in c-lightning currently, but I'm also not sure if it's easy / worthwhile to implement. I just had the idea while doing some channel rebalancing and thought I'd make an issue for discussion.

Say I have 20 channels - 15 good peers and 5 bad peers (with unbalanced channels, often offline, etc). I'd like to be able to exclude the 5 bad peers from any payments I might route. I'm not talking about payments I initiate, just payments that get routed through my node.

I'm assuming if I try to route a payment for someone else through one of my bad peers and the payment fails, that it will make my node look less reliable to whoever initialized the payment.

I'd like to keep the 5 bad peers because they are friends that I'd like to be able to take advantage of my nodes capacity/connectedness.

Another case where this would be useful is if I have a channel with a "bad peer" that I do business with frequently - I'd like to be able to pay them with Lightning, but I can't expect that every non-routing-node will have good node management practices.

The other way to solve this would be for me to have two nodes - a routing node and an intermediate "personal" node. The intermediate node connects to my routing node for liquidity and also connects to friends, businesses, etc. So the intermediate node acts as a bridge between my routing node and "bad peers".

If this were implemented, I expect the easiest UX would be to have an option in the config file, something like:

exclude-from-routing=$PEERID1
exclude-from-routing=$PEERID2

[sangbida]

This issue is being closed as part of issue cleanup.

Reason: About deprecated feature

If you believe this issue should remain open, please comment and we can reopen it.