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Permissionless systems (not only Bitcoin and Lightning!) often suffer from Sybil attacks, because it’s hard to distinguish malicious fake entities from real honest users. We describe a new class of solutions: privacy-preserving proving of Bitcoin ownership. We discuss how this idea could work to combat channel jamming in the LN.
The Lightning Network is the most deployed Bitcoin scaling solution aiming to serve as the next platform for the open financial future. The ambitious design of the LN comes with new classes of security and privacy attacks. Researching and mitigating them early is important to boost Lightning’s long-term trustworthiness and success.
Various Bitcoin protocols (Lightning, swaps, vaults, …) are still in their early stages, but we already can see some of the big challenges. Those protocols currently assume the possession of a UTXO by their participants. This is a scaling bound for a future with hundreds of millions of Bitcoin users. Another challenge raises from their unique on-chain fingerprint, which makes their use less private. Considering that some of them are privacy-oriented, the fingerprinting issue may result in imperfect fungibility. Coinpool is a solution to both problems.
Bitcoin relies on the peer-to-peer layer for nodes to exchange transactions and blocks. We work on protecting this layer from spies, amateur hackers, and larger threats. We are also putting effort into making it more efficient so that Bitcoin becomes more accessible even under rough conditions in any part of the world.