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Bitcoin core developer steps back from Lightning Network over “hard dilemma”

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Safety researcher and developer Antoine Riard is stepping down from the Lightning Community’s growth, citing safety points and elementary challenges to the Bitcoin ecosystem. 

In line with a thread on the Linux Basis’s public mailing listing, Riard believes the Bitcoin neighborhood faces a “arduous dilemma” as a brand new class of alternative biking assaults places Lightning in a “perilous place.”

The Lightning Community is the second-layer answer constructed over the Bitcoin blockchain. It’s designed to enhance the scalability and effectivity of Bitcoin transactions by enabling off-chain, peer-to-peer transactions.

Via the Lightning Community, customers can open fee channels, conduct a number of transactions off-chain, and settle the ultimate end result on the Bitcoin blockchain. The alternative biking assault targets these fee channels. It’s a new kind of assault that enables the attacker to steal funds from a channel participant by exploiting inconsistencies between particular person mempools. In line with Riard:

“I believe this new class of alternative biking assaults places lightning in a really perilous place, the place solely a sustainable repair can occur on the base-layer, e.g including a memory-intensive historical past of all-seen transactions or some consensus improve. Deployed mitigations are price one thing in face of straightforward assaults, although I do not assume they’re stopping superior attackers as mentioned within the first full disclosure mail.”

Riard additionally famous that addressing the brand new kind of assault could require adjustments to the underlying Bitcoin community:

“These kinds of adjustments are those necessitating the utmost transparency and buy-in of the neighborhood as a complete, as we’re altering the full-nodes processing necessities or the safety structure of the decentralized bitcoin ecosystem in its integrality.”

Lightning builders grapple with challenges, together with criticisms surrounding the community’s complexity and the calls for positioned on consumer expertise. Since its inception in 2018, the layer-2 community has gained reputation, with a complete worth locked reaching $159.5 million on the time of writing, according to knowledge from DefiLlama. Nevertheless, this determine remains to be very modest when in comparison with Bitcoin’s $587 billion market capitalization.

Riard plans to focus now on Bitcoin core growth, however warned about upcoming challenges for the foremost cryptocurrency ecosystem:

“Alternatively absolutely explaining why such adjustments can be warranted for the sake of lightning and for designing them effectively, we’d want to put out in full state sensible and important assaults on a ~5 355 public BTC ecosystem. Onerous dilemma. There could be a lesson when it comes to bitcoin protocol deployment […]”

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