#lnweeklynewsletter – a brief overview of what happened last week in a Lightning Network world 1-9 July
Ecosystem
Thoughts about eltoo: Another protocol for payment channel management in the lightning network
(tone: positive, on 9 July https://www.rene-pickhardt.de)
In this article I will give an overview about the proposed lightning network extension eltoo. There has been quite some buzz about the eltoo paper proposed by Christian Decker, Rusty Russell and Olaoluwa Osuntokun in May 2018. Bitcoin magazines and blogs have been making promising statements, that lightning will become even faster than it currently is. According to them them eltoo allows for payment channels to interact less with bitcoins blockchain (which I will state already is just plain wrong. Actually in eltoo we have to hit the blockchain more frequently than in the current implementation of the lightning network)
Bitcoin's Lightning Network Could Play Havoc With The Bitcoin Price
(tone: positive, on 6 July https://www.forbes.com)
Bitcoin's Lightning Network has been hailed as the saviour of bitcoin transactions — the thing that will allow the clunky and encumbered original blockchain-based cryptocurrency to compete with the likes of more nimble bitcoin cash, dash coin, lite coin and ripple. On bitcoin forums many talk of the Lightning Network as though it will solve all of bitcoin's problems, making transactions quick, cheap and easy. One question few have asked is, if the Lightning Network grows into a widely used bitcoin modification, what it will do to the bitcoin price — something that is closely linked to miners' fees and transaction costs.
What’s Holding Back The Lightning Network?
(tone: positive, on 3 July https://cryptobriefing.com)
The Lightning Network should be operational “this summer,” according to CoinJournal. In an article published on April 5th, Kyle Torpey reported that the second-layer solution, “Bitcoin’s saving grace,” was tantalizingly close to fruition, with the possibility of negligible fees and millions of transactions per second. Quoting Joseph Poon, the co-author of the Lightning Network white paper, the article predicted that the new network would soon “enable entirely new decentralized use cases for Bitcoin which were not possible before.”
If Lightning Network is "hot wallets" wont they get hacked if it gets to be big?
(tone: positive, on 9 July https://www.reddit.com)
Will we get a problem with Lightning Network and mass adoption?
(tone: negative, on 7 July https://www.reddit.com)
Rising ETH fees underline the need for Plasma & Lightning
(tone: positive, on 6 July https://www.bitcoinlightning.com)
In recent days we have seen another example of the importance of scaling. Ethereum – the second largest cryptocurrency by market cap- has seen its transactions fees (gas) increase dramatically. This is now believed to be the result of ill-advised tactics being used on the part of a small exchange. FCOIN has decided to allow users of their platform to vote on which alt-coins they would like to see listed on the exchange. Rather than hosting a poll, allowing for one vote per user, the exchange decided to follow a different path. They are counting each deposit as one vote. This has resulted in an enormous amount of deposits. People that would normally only have one vote are sending multiple deposits to the exchange in an effort to get their favourite token listed.
Amount-independent payment routing in Lightning Networks
(tone: positive, on 2 July https://medium.com)
This article describes an algorithm for amount-independent payment routing. In the current Lightning network, accurate capacities for channels other than your own channels are unknown. In the remainder of this article, capacities are assumed to be accurate. Author explain the notions of compound fee and compound capacity.
Products & Competition
Wasabi: Privacy Focused Bitcoin Wallet for Desktop
(tone: positive, on 3 July https://www.youtube.com)
Breaking bitcoin is an event for the technical community focusing on the security of Bitcoin and everything around it.
A few days ago I gave a talk at the Building on Bitcoin conference, where I unveiled Wasabi Wallet that will bring Bitcoin Privacy to a new level. If you are already familiar with my work, Wasabi is Hidden Wallet rebranded and rewritten from scratch with some new features.
Bootstrapping lightning network from ACINQ
(tone: positive, on http://diyhpl.us)
My name is Fabrice Drouin. I work with ACINQ. We are a company working on printing LN. I am going to talk about what happens, what was the process of bootstrapping and developing lightning and what happened on mainnet.
Analysis of the Lightning network routing problems reported by DIAR
(tone: positive, on 9 July https://medium.com)
A study conducted by Diar on June 29 has revealed that Lightning Network technology wouldn’t be so effective, the reliability that successful routing payment is still rather low, especially when high amounts are used. The probability of a LN payment success using a few dollars is 70%, while the success rate for a payment of about $ 200 is 1%.This happens because not all nodes have channels with a capacity equal to the above-mentioned amount or with larger amounts, making it difficult to find a routing between the various nodes available.This problem can be solved in a fairly simple way; if all nodes participating in the same LN had a capacity with larger amounts, there wouldn’t be any more relevant problems regarding routing, because precisely, routes would be found more easily, assuming, for example, that the capacity of each node is increased to a minimum of $ 200.
LND integration to BtcpayServer is done
(tone: positive, on 8 July https://twitter.com)
LND integration to BtcpayServer is done and now seems solid. Remaining is to include LND into the dockerfile and one click deploy and we are good.
Use cases & Success stories
5 Best Lightning Network Payment Processors 2018
(tone: positive, on 5 July https://bitcoinshirt.co)
Author decided to put all of payment processors together and in a way help potential merchants by providing a concise overview. If you’re a store owner and you want to accept Lightning Network payments, it’s always a good idea, like with anything in Bitcoin, to do your own research.
CoinJoin Looks Towards the Lightning Network for Added Privacy
(tone: positive, on 6 July https://www.bitcoinlightning.com)
Despite the claims of many politicians, Bitcoin transactions are not anonymous. Bitcoin developers are looking to change that with the addition of their new CoinJoinTX protocol. In its current state, BTC users can be tracked through the use of blockchain analysis tools which are readily available in the marketplace. CoinJoin’s latest protocol may eliminate these capabilities and help BTC users around the globe enjoy private transactions.
Giacomo Zucco unveils Lightning asset protocol
(tone: positive, on 5 July https://bitcoinist.com)
BHB Network founder and self-confessed Bitcoin maximalist Giacomo Zucco has revealed a Lightning Network-enabled protocol for launching tokenized assets on the Bitcoin blockchain.
BIP for Schnorr signatures finally proposed
(tone: positive, on https://github.com/)
This document proposes a standard for 64-byte Schnorr signatures over the elliptic curve secp256k1.
A New Blind ECDSA Scheme for Bitcoin Transaction Anonymity
(tone: positive, on 7 July https://eprint.iacr.org)
In this paper, we consider a scenario where a bitcoin liquidity provider sells bitcoins to clients. When a client pays for a bitcoin online, the provider is able to link the client's payment information to the bitcoin sold to that client. To address the clients' privacy concern, it is desirable for the provider to perform the bitcoin transaction with blind signatures. However, existing blind signature schemes are incompatible with the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) which is used by most of the existing bitcoin protocol, thus cannot be applied directly in Bitcoin. In this paper, we propose a new blind signature scheme that allows generating a blind signature compatible with the standard ECDSA. Afterwards, we make use of the new scheme to achieve bitcoin transaction anonymity. The new scheme is built on a variant of the Paillier cryptosystem and its homomorphic properties. As long as the modified Paillier cryptosystem is semantically secure, the new blind signature scheme has blindness and unforgeability.
Simple metric for channel usage ranking by Alex Bosworth
(tone: positive, on 7 July https://twitter.com)
The buildup of 1-sided capacity around a node on the Lightning Network demonstrates flaws in single-faceted models which focus on Sybil-able factors. I've been working on a simple metric for usage ranking with knobs that directly relate to observed utility.
Guide on running LND on Bitseed 3
(tone: positive, on https://github.com/)
This guide is a totally free and non professional test on my personal Bitseed 3, it works out well so I give it here, but please kindly note I’m not a professional developer, I’m not working in the Bitseed Team, and I can’t and I’ll not be able to give you further help. Try and use with caution, and note that LND is still under development and that we’re still very early. Don’t use mid or huge bitcoins quantities at this time, only small quantities, and consider it lost. Note that this guide is solely possible because of the work of Stadicus, that released his guide for LND on a Raspberry Pi, that I use for the LND installation on my node.
ln-paywall, a Go middleware for monetizing APIs with the Lightning Network
(tone: positive, on 2 July https://twitter.com)
I created "ln-paywall" during #Chainhack3 in Lisbon, which is a Go middleware for monetizing APIs with the Lightning Network. It was a great experience building on top of#LN using lnd and I hope my project helps increasing the adoption of it.
Preliminary set of watchtower wire messages
(tone: positive, on https://github.com/)
This PR adds the preliminary set of wire messages that will be used to negotiate and backup encrypted sweep info, that can be used by a watchtower in the event that it must sweep a revoked commitment transaction. The design borrows heavily from the existing lnwire package, which implements the Lightning wire protocol.