eltoo: A Simplified update Mechanism for Lightning and Off-Chain Contracts



Summary:

In a discussion about the Lightning specification, it was suggested to use a larger overall counter for updates by always having two update transactions and incrementing highbits when lobits saturates. This creates a single counter with 10^18 possible updates. This method is useful for channels that require more than 1 billion updates as resetting the locktime by rolling over to new update keys can be done. This would save a transaction if a cooperative close is done rather than an unilaterally close. Rolling over to new update keys requires an extra transaction on-chain. The suggestion for this method came from Anthony Towns.


Updated on: 2023-05-24T23:54:36.349929+00:00