Author: René Pickhardt 2022-05-26 21:32:30
Published on: 2022-05-26T21:32:30+00:00
In a recent blog post titled "Price of Anarchy from selfish routing strategies on the Lightning Network," Rene Pickhardt discusses how selfish behavior of nodes sending Bitcoin over the Lightning Network can lead to higher drain on channels, resulting in higher depletion and failure rates for payments on the network. Pickhardt's observations are derived purely from statistical measures and computations on the data that the Gossip Protocol and Bitcoin Network provides about the topology of the Lightning Network. The code for this research can be found in the lnresearch repository. While these preliminary results are presented for some of the strategies currently being deployed by `pay` implementations, Pickhardt has not yet been able to study the dynamics of the entire game or find the dominant strategies of routing and sending nodes. Routing nodes seem to be able to mitigate some of the effects, but it seems as if they can hardly engage in selfish behavior or strategies themselves to help with flow and congestion control. This is because all operations that routing nodes could engage in are limited through protocol design. Pickhardt hopes that the described effects won't be too strong for the expected traffic and usage of the network so that the technology will work properly at the required scale. He welcomes thoughts, feedback, comments, and questions on his findings. In his current understanding, the game theory of the Lightning network may produce limitations to the amount of traffic the protocol may eventually be able to handle.
Updated on: 2023-06-03T08:45:18.819731+00:00