Author: Lloyd Fournier 2020-12-15 06:07:04
Published on: 2020-12-15T06:07:04+00:00
In an email exchange, Lloyd Fournier discusses the advantages and disadvantages of using YOLO commitment transactions versus oblivious settlements for recovering funds. Fournier claims that before revealing a recovery, one is guaranteed to have a transaction in hand that they can broadcast first, choose the fee to be as high as they like, and is not replaceable. If the malicious party is not willing to risk broadcasting a revoked transaction, then one is guaranteed to recover the face value of the transaction(s) they have in hand. Fournier states that an honest party is never at risk of broadcasting a revoked commitment transaction. The current system only has point 3 while oblivious mutual close has points 1, 2, and 3, and YOLO commitments have points 1 and 5. The question is whether paying the price of losing points 2 and 3 is worth the upgrade from point 1 to point 5. Fournier notes that the concern with point 1 is that once one broadcasts the obliviously transferred "mutual close" transaction, the malicious party then has a hint that data has been lost and can try to broadcast a favorable revoked transaction. Fournier also mentions that in YOLO commitment transactions, one must recover some additional metadata from the other party, particularly the compressed revocation keys that one should know, otherwise, the channel cannot continue to operate. A signature on the compressed revocation keys must be given to the other party before data is lost and returned when one is given the commitment transaction upon reconnection. Finally, Fournier and David A. Harding discuss the revocable signature based channels. Fournier explains that in witness asymmetric channels, one could lose all funds from all their channels with all their peers if they ever broadcast a single revoked commitment transaction. He also sees no reason why one couldn't apply revocable signatures to transaction asymmetric channels, but it would require overhauling the revocation mechanism. Fournier agrees with Harding's points that side-channels may be effective tools to reveal whether a node has had data loss or not and believes that it is easy enough to simulate data loss up to a point to try and catch malicious peers using side channels in both YOLO commitments and oblivious mutual close.
Updated on: 2023-06-03T03:22:51.460270+00:00