lightning-dev

LN without SegWit: less efficient or less secure?

LN without SegWit: less efficient or less secure?

Original Postby Rusty Russell

Posted on: January 16, 2017 02:30 UTC

The Lightning Network mailing list has been relatively inactive, with most activity taking place on the Github repository related to the network.

The discussion has turned towards the feasibility of the Lightning Network without the activation of SegWit, given that it appears stalled at around 26%. However, Rusty Russell notes that if SegWit does not activate, there is something wrong with Bitcoin and its adoption is necessary to make Bitcoin work better. While miners are cautious about upgrades, adoption will take time to roll out across products anyway. Furthermore, a question was raised regarding security problems in relation to having to watch the blockchain, and whether outsourcing this job to a server could solve the problem. Rusty responded by noting that outsourcing poses a problem as you cannot hand the outsourcer a penalty transaction signature if you don't know what the bad transaction will look like, especially since the signatures are part of the transaction ID.