Bitcoin's Lightning Network (LN) is a scalability solution for Bitcoin allowing transactions to be issued with negligible fees and settled instantly at scale. In order to use LN, funds need to be locked in payment channels on the Bitcoin blockchain (Layer-1) for subsequent use in LN (Layer-2). LN is comprised of many payment channels forming a payment channel network. LN's promise is that relatively few payment channels already enable anyone to efficiently, securely and privately route payments across the whole network. In this paper, we quantify the structural properties of LN and argue that LN's current topological properties can be ameliorated in order to improve the security of LN, enabling it to reach its true potential.
@article{arxiv.1901.04972,
title = {Topological Analysis of Bitcoin's Lightning Network},
author = {István András Seres and László Gulyás and Dániel A. Nagy and Péter Burcsi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1901.04972},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
Added some remarks regarding how centralized is liquidity