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Payment channel networks (PCNs) are a promising solution to the scalability problem of cryptocurrencies. Any two users connected by a payment channel in the network can theoretically send an unbounded number of instant, costless…
The Lightning Network (LN) is a prominent payment channel network aimed at addressing Bitcoin's scalability issues. Due to the privacy of channel balances, senders cannot reliably choose sufficiently liquid payment paths and resort to a…
Payment channel networks like Bitcoin's Lightning network are an auspicious approach for realizing high transaction throughput and almost-instant confirmations in blockchain networks. However, the ability to successfully make payments in…
The Lightning Network is a peer-to-peer network designed to address Bitcoin's scalability challenges, facilitating rapid, cost-effective, and instantaneous transactions through bidirectional, blockchain-backed payment channels among network…
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.…
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…
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…
Payment Channel Networks (PCNs) are a method for improving the scaling and latency of cryptocurrency transactions. For a payment to be made between two peers in a PCN, a feasible low-fee path in the network must be planned. Many PCN path…
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 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…
As Lightning network payments are neither broadcasted nor publicly stored. Thus LN has been seen not only as scalability but also as privacy solution for Bitcoin. The protocol guarantees that only the latest channel state can be confirmed…
The Lightning Network, a payment channel network with a market cap of over 192M USD, is designed to resolve Bitcoin's scalability issues through fast off-chain transactions. There are multiple Lightning Network client implementations, all…
Payment channel networks (PCNs) are a promising technology that alleviates blockchain scalability by shifting the transaction load from the blockchain to the PCN. Nevertheless, the network topology has to be carefully designed to maximise…
In this work, we reexamine the vulnerability of Payment Channel Networks (PCNs) to bribing attacks, where an adversary incentivizes blockchain miners to deliberately ignore a specific transaction to undermine the punishment mechanism of…
The Lightning Network is a scaling solution for Bitcoin that promises to enable rapid and private payment processing. In Lightning, multi-hop payments are secured by utilizing Hashed Time-Locked Contracts (HTLCs) and encrypted on the…
Payment channel networks (PCNs) are a promising technology to improve the scalability of cryptocurrencies. PCNs, however, face the challenge that the frequent usage of certain routes may deplete channels in one direction, and hence prevent…
Cryptocurrency off-chain networks such as Lightning (e.g., Bitcoin) or Raiden (e.g., Ethereum) aim to increase the scalability of traditional on-chain transactions. To support nodes in learning about possible paths to route their…
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…
In the Bitcoin system, transaction fees serve as an incentive for blockchain confirmations. In general, a transaction with a higher fee is likely to be included in the next block mined, whereas a transaction with a smaller fee or no fee may…
The Bitcoin Lightning Network (LN) is designed to improve the scalability of blockchain systems by using off-chain payment paths to settle transactions in a faster, cheaper, and more private manner. This work aims to empirically study LN's…