Author: Mark Friedenbach 2015-08-14 00:47:17
Published on: 2015-08-14T00:47:17+00:00
On August 13, 2015, Joseph Poon expressed concern over the possibility of a systemic supervillain attack on the Lightning network that could be mitigated with a timestop bit. However, a proposal by an unknown author and under discussion did not include such a provision. The author of this response is not convinced that the risk is high enough to warrant protocol-level complications, even if there is a threat. The scenario involves a hub cheating all its users out of their bonds, but users can protect themselves by broadcasting their own transactions spending part or all of the balance as fees. If the hub cheats many users at once by DoS'ing the network, it may spend more in fees than any one participant stands to lose. However, since users don't act alone, they have enough coins to burn to make the attack unprofitable. Therefore, the hub-cheats-many-users case is the same as the hub-cheats-one-user case if the users act out their role in unison, which they don't have to coordinate to do. Moreover, the author thinks that timestop is not the appropriate solution, as it would add further complication to the consensus protocol. A simpler solution seems to be outsourcing the response to an attack to a third party or engineering ways for users to respond-by-default even if their wallet is offline, or otherwise assuring sufficient coordination in the event of a bad hub.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T19:20:48.885901+00:00