[Lightning-dev] Commitment delay asymmetry

Daniel McNally therealsangaman at gmail.com
Sun Apr 15 19:52:13 UTC 2018


Thanks ZmnSCPxj and Jim,

> Indeed, in the situation where you are funding a new channel to me, I have 0 satoshi on the channel and can perform this attack costlessly.

My thinking here is that an attacker would have a hard time getting
others to open new channels with them, and that even when others do
there are other ways to misbehave as you mentioned.

Otherwise I agree with Jim and the asymmetry seems more of a concern.
I haven't fully thought this through yet, but one thought might be to
scale the other side's delay according to the balance of the channel.
For example, in the case where the side unilaterally closing the
channel has zero balance, the other side gets no delay and symmetry as
measured by (coins locked) * (duration of lock) equals zero on both
sides. When the side closing the channel has at least 50% of the
balance, both sides must wait the full delay. Thoughts?

Daniel


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