Author: Tejaswi Nadahalli 2020-06-29 11:57:52
Published on: 2020-06-29T11:57:52+00:00
In a recent discussion on the bitcoin-dev mailing list, participants were analyzing the likelihood of a double-spending attack succeeding in Lightning Network. David A. Harding suggested that even a small amount of "myopic" hashrate and long timeouts, or modest amounts of hashrate and short timeouts would make this kind of attack unlikely to succeed. Additionally, if Bob wants to compensate for the high chance of losing out on gaining any transaction fees while offering a bribe, he will have to offer a very large one. Separately, some researchers were working on a similar problem and came up with a paper on it. They looked at the Alice's-Fees/Bob's-Bribe ratio and distinguished between "strong" and "weak" miners. If a miner is weak, their hash-rate is lower than this fees/bribe ratio, whereas strong miners' hash rate is more than this ratio. They found that if there are only strong miners, Bob will win, but if there is at least one weak miner, Alice has to win given a reasonable timeout value. They also mentioned that Lightning has a parameter called "channel-reserve_satoshis," which directly helps counter this bribe by giving Alice some leeway in fees.
Updated on: 2023-06-14T02:33:44.626026+00:00