Author: Rusty Russell 2015-09-23 02:42:57
Published on: 2015-09-23T02:42:57+00:00
In this context, Rusty Russell discusses the use of beacon nodes in a global peer-to-peer network for routing payments in Lightning Network. A consensus protocol is required for choosing an ordering of potential beacons, and potential beacons have to have committed to a beacon ID prior to ordering being chosen with spam/flooding protection. They also need a gossip protocol to announce potential beacons and compare against ordering, keeping the top few in memory. To avoid fake beacons, a signature attached to an unspent bitcoin TX from before beacon selection can be used. Nodes tell each other about their 12 favourite beacons once they have the ordering, and nodes announcing their best routes to their neighbours are basically just Dijkstra's algorithm in parallel. Privacy implications arise when nodes lookup a route for anyone, which means a DHT of routes-to-beacons is needed to be set up. Additionally, fees have to be queryable, so that's a separate DHT. There are several details such as how many beacon nodes will be there, how long before a beacon node becomes invalid, etc. Rate limiting decreases in fees is always safe, and no beacons or routing DHTs are required, just fees by a gossip protocol.
Updated on: 2023-05-23T20:16:49.164964+00:00