Author: ZmnSCPxj 2019-11-05 04:59:33
Published on: 2019-11-05T04:59:33+00:00
The Lightning Network community has been looking at methods to prevent spamming on the network. Rusty Russell, a prominent member of the community, has presented a proposal to prevent Type 2 spam through upfront payments. He suggests adding an extended message feature bit and a push of msat on commitment_signed along with a hash when an HTLC is added. If the HTLC fails or succeeds, some of those msat are returned with a count and preimage. To forward payment, users have to present a series of preimages which they receive by decoding the onion. They get to keep 50 msat per preimage presented. The base rate for forwarding is 16 preimages, but it reduces by one for each leading 4 zero bits of the SHA256(blockhash | hmac) of the onion. The final node gets a variable number of preimages, which adds noise. Rusty's proposal leaks forward information and makes an explicit tradeoff for the sender between amount spent and privacy. However, he believes that it is the best solution available.
Updated on: 2023-06-02T21:08:45.859266+00:00