Author: Joseph Poon 2015-08-20 21:08:23
Published on: 2015-08-20T21:08:23+00:00
In August 2015, Joseph Poon raised concerns about a potential attack on the Lightning Network. The attack involved routing a payment back to another channel owned by the attacker and then refusing to disclose R, causing every node in the path to lock up N bitcoins (in other words, nobody gets paid). However, it was mentioned that this could be considered as a feature if the coins were expected to be locked up for the duration from the outset. This would force the graph to be more diffuse and require intermediate nodes who are well-connected to offload their HTLCs to third-party channel liquidity providers.Poon proposed that a solution to this problem would be to establish blame via information disclosure. However, this could lead to graph centralization. The primary issue with "onion" routing is that some parts of the graph may be faster with disclosure of R. This can result in higher costs for some people in the "time" part of "time-value". There was also concern that an emergent cartelization incentive could occur if onion routing was forced only on everything. One possible solution suggested by Thaddeus was to send funds to each participant with multiple signatures for different times of disclosure of R. However, this would require a longer-term malleability fix and a more elaborate tree structure for the HTLC spends. Overall, while there were concerns and ideas proposed, no clear solution was finalized at the time.
Updated on: 2023-05-23T19:36:10.106024+00:00