Author: Benjamin Mord 2018-01-30 16:26:36
Published on: 2018-01-30T16:26:36+00:00
The discussion revolves around the issue of maintaining consensus during or after a fork of the underlying blockchain(s) in lightning nodes. The chain_hash is used to identify the currency in use, but it becomes unclear which hash identifies BTC as opposed to BCH. While consensus among most Lightning developers is that BTC is "the real BTC" and gets the Satoshi genesis hash, BCH is considered an altcoin that was forked off BTC and gets as hash the branching-off point. The priority is to get implementations to a state where they can safely deploy on Bitcoin Mainnet. Greater support for altcoins can be done later, and for forked altcoins, short channel IDs contain the block height at which the funding transaction confirmed, which might be used to judge if a channel contains forked coins or not. The concern is about safety despite BIP 50 scenarios, forks with more legitimate contention than so far seen, and also system stability in the face of an increasingly unsophisticated / gullible user base. Resilience against forks would seem core to safety, and if there are entities financially motivated to fracture that consensus, it seems circular to assume consensus in its design.
Updated on: 2023-05-24T18:43:28.513302+00:00