From aj at erisian.com.au Sat Sep 19 02:30:33 2015 From: aj at erisian.com.au (Anthony Towns) Date: Sat, 19 Sep 2015 12:30:33 +1000 Subject: [Lightning-dev] Decker&Wattenhofer channels In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <30188EDB-7B0F-4719-A783-2A14BC4F0453@erisian.com.au> On 19 September 2015 10:14:52 am AEST, Andrew Miller wrote: >Are there any downsides of the alternative proposed in this paper? >There >was a discussion on Bitcoin subreddit but it got derailed >https://m.reddit.com/r/compscipapers/comments/3at959/a_fast_and_scalable_payment_network_with_bitcoin/ The main difference between this and the lightning paper seems to be using timelocks to guarantee revocability rather than a key/hash scheme. To me Rusty's hash scheme seems fine, so I don't see the point. Drawbacks to this scheme afaics are that it requires stronger malleability fixes than are likely anytime soon, and it sets a decreasing timelock on the channel, so the channel starts with a deadline then progressively reduces it. That time lock needs to be both large to give the channel as long a lifetime as possible, but also small because every HTLC on the channel has to have a larger timelock on the refund side. I think that greatly limits the lifetime of a channel compared to relative lock time lightning channels. (The refresh operation hits the block chain, so is effectively opening a new channel IMO) If the chained revocation secrets turn out to be insecure or too heavyweight, this seems worth looking into further, but otherwise not afaics. Setting Delta T to 1 hour seems bogus, but I don't think that had any effect on the rest of the proposal. For reference, I think the reddit comment thread was https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3aohkv/olaoluwa_osuntokun_on_twitter_a_simpler/ Cheers, aj -- Sent from my phone.