Re:Crypto lobbying is going ballistic
by throwaway405769 on Wednesday December 08, 2021 @12:30PM
(#29487690)
No, that's not how LN works. If the other party suddenly closes the channel at an old state that is beneficial to them, the funds will get locked for 2 weeks and you will have enough time to publish a transaction with a more recent state, which will reward you with whole balance of the channel [0].
Re:Crypto lobbying is going ballistic
by tsimionescu on Thursday December 09, 2021 @08:08AM
(#29496928)
As that article explains, that only works if the non-closing node notices the problem in time to contest this. And, according to your article, this period is 24h, not 2 weeks.
I'd also note that this seems to make DoS much worse of a problem. If I have a transaction with a node that has gone offline and can't be reached, and I initiate a forced closure, what's to stop the other node from taking all the money in the channel, especially if I am not constantly online and the channel state I can't know for sure if the other node may have made some transactions while I was away?
It also can't scale the way it's usually promised, in part due to Bitcoin's horribly low transaction rate (you can't open LN channels fast enough, given Bitcoin's transaction rate), in part because of limits on the number of transactions in a live channel.
And in practice, it seems it's highly centralized [0].
0: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/aba062