Related papers: Probing Channel Balances in the Lightning Network
Today, payment paths in Bitcoin's Lightning Network are found by searching for shortest paths on the fee graph. We enhance this approach in two dimensions. Firstly, we take into account the probability of a payment actually being possible…
In this work we use formal verification to prove that the Lightning Network (LN), the most prominent scaling technique for Bitcoin, always safeguards the funds of honest users. We provide a custom implementation of (a simplification of) LN,…
Off-chain transaction networks can mitigate the scalability issues of today's trustless electronic cash systems such as Bitcoin. However, these peer-to-peer networks also introduce a new attack surface which is not well-understood today.…
The Lightning Network, known for its millisecond settlement speeds and low transaction fees, offers a compelling alternative to traditional payment processors, which often have higher fees and longer processing times. This is particularly…
Verifying the private liquidity state of Lightning Network (LN) channels is desirable for auditors, service providers, and network participants who need assurance of financial capacity. Current methods often lack robustness against a…
Payment channel networks (PCN) are used in cryptocurrencies to enhance the performance and scalability of off-chain transactions. Except for opening and closing of a payment channel, no other transaction requests accepted by a PCN are…
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…
Bitcoin, Ethereum and other blockchain-based cryptocurrencies, as deployed today, cannot scale for wide-spread use. A leading approach for cryptocurrency scaling is a smart contract mechanism called a payment channel which enables two…
The Lightning Network (LN) is one of the most promising off-chain scaling solutions for Bitcoin, as it enables off-chain payments which are not subject to the well-known blockchain scalability limit. In this work, we introduce CLoTH, a…
Nodes in the Lightning Network synchronise routing information through a gossip protocol that makes use of a staggered broadcast mechanism. In this work, we show that the convergence delay in the network is larger than what would be…
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…
Cryptocurrency networks such as Bitcoin have emerged as a distributed alternative to traditional centralized financial transaction networks. However, there are major challenges in scaling up the throughput of such networks. Lightning…
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…
Blockchains are decentralized and immutable databases that are shared among the nodes of the network. Although blockchains have attracted a great scale of attention in the recent years by disrupting the traditional financial systems, the…
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…
Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum have made payment transactions possible without a trusted third party, but they have a scalability issue due to their consensus mechanisms. Payment networks have emerged to overcome this…
Payment channel networks (PCNs) enhance the scalability of blockchains by allowing parties to conduct transactions off-chain, i.e, without broadcasting every transaction to all blockchain participants. To conduct transactions, a sender and…
Network embedding represents network nodes by a low-dimensional informative vector. While it is generally effective for various downstream tasks, it may leak some private information of networks, such as hidden private links. In this work,…
Payment channel networks (PCNs) are among the most promising solutions to the scalability issues in permissionless blockchains, by allowing parties to pay each other off-chain through a path of payment channels (PCs). However, routing…
Resource-constrained devices are unable to maintain a full copy of the Bitcoin Blockchain in memory. This paper proposes a bidirectional payment channel framework for IoT devices. This framework utilizes Bitcoin Lightning-Network-like…