Related papers: A Centrality Analysis of the Lightning Network
More than ten years ago the blockchain was acclaimed as the solution to overcome centralised trusted third parties for online payments. Through the years the crypto-movement changed and evolved, although decentralisation remained the core…
Payment channel networks (PCNs) are viewed as one of the most promising scalability solutions for cryptocurrencies today. Roughly, PCNs are networks where each node represents a user and each directed, weighted edge represents funds…
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…
Cryptocurrencies redefined how money can be stored and transferred among users. However, independent of the amount being sent, public blockchain-based cryptocurrencies suffer from high transaction waiting times and fees. These drawbacks…
The ambition of the Lightning Network is to provide a second layer to the Bitcoin network to enable transactions confirmed instantly, securely and anonymously with a world scale capacity using a decentralized protocol. Some of the current…
Making a payment in a privacy-aware payment channel network is achieved by trying several payment paths until one succeeds. With a large network, such as the Lightning Network, a completion of a single payment can take up to several…
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…
Proof of work cryptocurrencies began with the promise of a more egalitarian future with a decentralized monetary system with no powerful entities in charge. While this vision is far from realized, these cryptocurrencies are still touted to…
Cryptocurrency is a well-developed blockchain technology application that is currently a heated topic throughout the world. The public availability of transaction histories offers an opportunity to analyze and compare different…
Lightning Network (LN) is designed to amend the scalability and privacy issues of Bitcoin. It's a payment channel network where Bitcoin transactions are issued off chain, onion routed through a private payment path with the aim to settle…
Payment channel is a protocol which allows cryptocurrency users to route multiple transactions through network without committing them to the main blockchain network (mainnet). This ability makes them the most prominent solution to…
Q&A websites rely on user-generated responses, with incentives such as reputation scores or monetary rewards often offered. While some users may find it intrinsically rewarding to assist others, studies indicate that payment can improve the…
Blockchain technology is among the fastest-growing technologies in the world today. It has been adopted in diverse areas but mostly in financial systems, such as Bitcoin cryptocurrency. Therefore, it is a niche that has attracted interest…
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,…
Payment networks, also known as channels, are a most promising solution to the throughput problem of cryptocurrencies. In this paper we study the design of capital-efficient payment networks, offline as well as online variants. We want to…
As a promising implementation model of payment channel network (PCN), payment channel hub (PCH) could achieve high throughput by providing stable off-chain transactions through powerful hubs. However, existing PCH schemes assume hubs…
Today's world is organized based on merit and value. A single global currency that's decentralized is needed for a global economy. Bitcoin is a partial solution to this need, however it suffers from scalability problems which prevent it…
Blockchain has received increasing attention in academia and industry. However, the increasing transaction volumes and limited on-chain storage underscore scalability as a key challenge hindering the widespread adoption of blockchain.…
Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are realized using distributed systems and hence critically rely on the performance and security of the interconnecting network. The requirements on these networks and their usage, however can differ…
Blockchains use peer-to-peer networks for disseminating information among peers, but these networks currently do not have any provable guarantees for desirable properties such as Byzantine fault tolerance, good connectivity and small…