Author: Anthony Towns 2015-10-19 01:41:00
Published on: 2015-10-19T01:41:00+00:00
In a discussion about the Lightning Network, Mats Jerratsch suggested that an attacker could vandalize the system by opening channels with other nodes. However, another participant in the discussion argued that this would be difficult for an attacker to do because the probability of selecting a vandal node would be relatively low, and only $10 would need to be locked up for a couple of days to test connectivity. They also suggested that anyone could forward payments for others, allowing users to utilize someone they know and trust in real life. The discussion then moved on to the topic of attackers relaying all payments but being able to distinguish between payers and payees, which was deemed unlikely due to the cost of running so many nodes. It was suggested that an arms race in nodes-per-person would probably cause scaling problems for the network, and that spamming the list of channels with valid-looking edges that won't actually route payments successfully could also harm the network.
Updated on: 2023-05-18T15:34:26.625822+00:00