Lightning Network is currently starting to build up, it has recently passed 2 Million dollars in capacity, but its still far from being perfect, there’s currently very little ways of assessing how much fees a payer will pay, although its currently mostly a negligible value, it may not be in the future.

A use case of the Payee paying the fees of the transaction is used in almost every exchange platform, because on the main blockchain you can assess the current average fees and even figure out how much, on average, it will take your payment to be accepted by the network if you sent it with a definite amount, this currently does not exist in Lightning.

If the payee pays the fees the payer can route the payment towards complicit nodes that charge way higher fees than average.

Pending payments are a common UX problem for LN that users often complain about. While the cause of this problem is not easily unraveled, there have been several issues involving stuck intermediate nodes awaiting revocation and recipients who can’t give timely preimage replies.

Fabrice Drouin proposed a change to address the issue using a faster “proceed/try another route” answer using a probe with a short timeout requirement. The system sends the blank probe request prior to sending the actual payment, via the same route.