Bitcoin's Lightning Network Is Growing 'Increasingly Centralized,' Researchers Find

Published on by Coindesk | Published on

Bitcoin's lightning network is growing "Increasingly centralized," making it more susceptible to attacks, asserts a new paper by security researchers.

Seen as a potential solution to bitcoin's scaling headaches, lightning is a payment network allowing for speedier and cheaper transactions.

Partly to make lightning more robust, developers and researchers have been trying to spot holes in the network.

Released earlier this month, the paper "Lightning Network: a second path towards centralisation of the Bitcoin economy" concludes that lightning has an "Unequal wealth distribution" with a smaller percentage of nodes on the network gradually accumulating a larger proportion of bitcoin.

Specifically, the researchers found that 10 percent of the nodes control 80 percent of funds on the network.

If most of the bitcoin is held mostly on a few nodes, this could make the network more vulnerable to attacks because removing these routing nodes would leave gaping holes.

"Removing hubs leads to the collapse of the network into many components... suggesting that this network may be a target for the so-called split attacks," potentially leading to lightning being divided in half.

The researchers analyzed how the global network of nodes used for sending payments from place to place has evolved over time, by combing through a series of snapshots of the network over a period of 18 months.

In a similar what-could-go-wrong exercise, Hebrew University researchers released a paper this week showing how to execute a "Congestion attack" on the lightning network, making it tough to send payments.

"Our results show that it is possible to disrupt the Lightning Network by locking most of its liquidity using less than half a bitcoin," the paper reads.

x