BOLT4 defines onion routing for messages and payments in the lightning network. This is really cool. However, I’m wondering how message routing is incentivized? Payment routing seems to be clearly incentivized as each node hop gets to collect a fee, I just don’t understand how the messages are incentivized.
It seems like onion messaging is starting to be used for more and more things. BOLT12 uses it to exchange invoice_requests and invoices. bLIP32 proposes doing DNS over onion messaging. As usage of onion messaging continues to grow, at what point will the current model for forwarding onion messages get abused and fail to scale and no longer work reliably? The TOR network seems to suffer this problem, it is a free service and there is no incentive for running a node, so it is very slow and unreliable because many people try to use it.
