Author: Michael Folkson 2021-06-21 10:20:40
Published on: 2021-06-21T10:20:40+00:00
In a recent email thread, Antoine Riard and David A. Harding discussed potential changes to Bitcoin Core and Lightning Network. While there are more contributors in the ecosystem today than pre-2017, changes to Core are generally likely to be implemented and reviewed by current Core contributors. Meanwhile, Lightning implementation developers seem to have their hands full with their own implementations. However, timelines for these changes are difficult to predict and can be speculative at best.The Lightning Network is currently facing a problem concerning the pre-signed feerate issue. Two potential solutions have been proposed: package-relay or SIGHASH_ANYPREVOUT. However, there does not seem to be much discussion on how the latter will solve pinnings beyond those in Lightning meetings logs. This could allow attackers using pinning to reuse their attack at no cost, forcing the honest user to pay another anyprevout bounty to miners repeatedly, resulting in the honest user spending more on fees than their balance from the closed channel.Riard proposes using SIGHASH_ANYPREVOUT as a solution to the pre-signed feerate problem, but Harding suggests that it may not be appropriate to create timelines that depend on the work of a large number of contributors who he does not believe feel entitled to be consulted in a decentralized development process. Despite this, Riard believes in spreading ideas and learning from others in a hacker ethos.If Bitcoin Core can rewrite the blind CPFP fee bump transaction to refer to any prevout, anyone else can do the same, incentivizing miners who were aware of two or more states from an eltoo channel to rewrite to the oldest state. This would give them fee revenue now and ensure fee revenue in the future when a later state update is broadcast. Even if this analysis is wrong, promoting the anyprevout idea without more detail could cause problems. Creating deployment timelines without consulting a large number of contributors seems inappropriate and unrealistic, as it is unclear how long it will take for things to get done. However, package-relay seems like a reasonable temporary solution, as it is useful for CPFP fee bumping low feerate transactions received from an external party.
Updated on: 2023-06-14T23:23:40.714831+00:00