Related papers: CLoTH: a Simulator for HTLC Payment Networks
Payment channel networks, such as Bitcoin's Lightning Network, promise to improve the scalability of blockchain systems by processing the majority of transactions off-chain. Due to the design, the positioning of nodes in the network…
Payment channel networks provide a fast and scalable solution to relay funds, acting as a second layer to slower and less scalable blockchain protocols. In this paper, we present an accessible, low-cost attack in which the attacker…
The Bitcoin Lightning Network (BLN), a so-called "second layer" payment protocol, was launched in 2018 to scale up the number of transactions between Bitcoin owners. In this paper, we analyse the structure of the BLN over a period of 18…
Recently, distributed ledger technologies like blockchain have been proliferating and have attracted interest from the academic community, government, and industry. A wide range of blockchain solutions has been introduced, such as Bitcoin,…
We study a random process over graphs inspired by the way payments are executed in the Lightning Network, the main layer-two solution on top of Bitcoin. We first prove almost tight upper and lower bounds on the time it takes for a payment…
The Lightning Network (LN) has enjoyed rapid growth over recent years, and has become the most popular scaling solution for the Bitcoin blockchain. The security of the LN relies on the ability of the nodes to close a channel by settling…
The Bitcoin Lightning Network is a layer 2 protocol designed to facilitate fast and inexpensive Bitcoin transactions. It operates by establishing channels between users, where Bitcoin is locked and transactions are conducted off-chain until…
Micropayment channels are the most prominent solution to the limitation on transaction throughput in current blockchain systems. However, in practice channels are risky because participants have to be online constantly to avoid fraud, and…
Hashed Timelock Contract (HTLC) in Lightning Network is susceptible to a griefing attack. An attacker can block several channels and stall payments by mounting this attack. A state-of-the-art countermeasure, Hashed Timelock Contract with…
Blockchain has attracted much attention from both academia and industry since emerging in 2008. Due to the inconvenience of the deployment of large-scale blockchains, blockchain simulators are used to facilitate blockchain design and…
Cryptocurrencies are widely used, yet current methods for analyzing transactions often rely on opaque, black-box models. While these models may achieve high performance, their outputs are usually difficult to interpret and adapt, making it…
Blockchain offers a decentralized, immutable, transparent system of records. It offers a peer-to-peer network of nodes with no centralised governing entity making it unhackable and therefore, more secure than the traditional paper-based or…
The fundamental building blocks of the Bitcoin lightning network are bidirectional payment channels. We describe an extension of payment channels in the Proofgold network which allow the two parties to bet on whether a proposition will be…
While various covert botnets were proposed in the past, they still lack complete anonymization for their servers/botmasters or suffer from slow communication between the botmaster and the bots. In this paper, we propose a new generation…
With the growing concern of AI safety, there is a need to trust the computations done by machine learning (ML) models. Blockchain technology, known for recording data and running computations transparently and in a tamper-proof manner, can…
Bitcoin is currently subject to a significant pay-for-speed trade-off. This is caused by lengthy and highly variable transaction confirmation times, especially during times of congestion. Users can reduce their transaction confirmation…
The Lightning Network is the most widely used payment channel network (PCN) to date, making it an attractive attack surface for adversaries. In this paper, we analyze the Lightning Network's PCN topology and investigate its resilience…
Bitcoin is the cryptocurrency with the largest market capitalisation, but its widespread adoption is fundamentally limited by the scalability constraints of its consensus algorithm, which requires every transaction to be confirmed onchain.…
FlyClient is a lightweight blockchain verification protocol that enables proof-of-work validation using minimal data, making it ideal for resource-constrained environments like mobile wallets, Internet-of-Things devices or cross-chain…
While being decentralized, secure, and reliable, Bitcoin and many other blockchain-based cryptocurrencies suffer from scalability issues. One of the promising proposals to address this problem is off-chain payment channels. Since, not all…