Author: ZmnSCPxj 2018-01-30 06:16:02
Published on: 2018-01-30T06:16:02+00:00
The topic of how lightning nodes maintain consensus during or after a fork of the underlying blockchain(s) has not been addressed in BOLTs. Channel_announcement messages use a chain_hash to identify the currency in use, which is defined as the hash of the underlying block chain's genesis block. For BTC and BCH, the rough consensus among most Lightning developers is that BTC is "the real BTC" and gets the Satoshi genesis hash, while BCH is an altcoin that was forked off BTC and gets the branching-off point as the hash. The handling of intentional and unintentional forks in existing channels remains a difficult question to answer. The priority for developers is to get implementations to a state where they can be safely deployed on Bitcoin Mainnet. Greater support for altcoins can be done later. For forked altcoins, short channel IDs contain the block height at which the funding transaction confirmed, which could be used to judge if a channel contains forked coins.
Updated on: 2023-05-24T18:43:00.713332+00:00