Paper 2018/918

Scalable Lightning Factories for Bitcoin

Alejandro Ranchal-Pedrosa, Maria Potop-Butucaru, and Sara Tucci-Piergiovanni

Abstract

Bitcoin, the most popular blockchain system, does not scale even under very optimistic assumptions. Lightning networks, a layer on top of Bitcoin, composed of one-to-one lightning channels make it scale to up to 105 Million users. Recently, Duplex Micropayment Channel factories have been proposed based on opening multiple one-to-one payment channels at once. Duplex Micropayment Channel factories rely on time-locks to update and close their channels. This mechanism yields to situation where users funds time-locking for long periods increases with the lifetime of the factory and the number of users. This makes DMC factories not applicable in real-life scenarios. In this paper, we propose the first channel factory construction, the Lightning Factory that offers a constant collateral cost, independent of the lifetime of the channel and members of the factory. We compare our proposed design with Duplex Micropayment Channel factories, obtaining better performance results by a factor of more than 3000 times in terms of the worst-case constant collateral cost incurred when malicious users use the factory. The message complexity of our factory is $n$ where Duplex Micropayment Channel factories need $n^2$ messages where $n$ is the number of users. Moreover, our factory copes with an infinite number of updates while in Duplex Micropayment Channel factories the number of updates is bounded by the initial time-lock. Finally, we discuss the necessity for our Lightning Factories of BNN, a non-interactive aggregate signature cryptographic scheme, and compare it with Schnorr and ECDSA schemes used in Bitcoin and Duplex Micropayment Channels.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Publication info
Preprint. MINOR revision.
Keywords
BitcoinBlockchainScalabilityLightning Network.
Contact author(s)
a ranchalpedrosa @ gmail com
History
2019-01-31: last of 3 revisions
2018-10-02: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2018/918
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2018/918,
      author = {Alejandro Ranchal-Pedrosa and Maria Potop-Butucaru and Sara Tucci-Piergiovanni},
      title = {Scalable Lightning Factories for Bitcoin},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2018/918},
      year = {2018},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/918}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/918}
}
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