lightning-dev

LN without SegWit: less efficient or less secure?

LN without SegWit: less efficient or less secure?

Original Postby Andrés G. Aragoneses

Posted on: January 16, 2017 04:57 UTC

In a discussion about the inactivity of a mailing list, Rusty Russell suggests that most of the activity has been on the Github repository.

When asked if Lightning Network (LN) is feasible without SegWit given its stalled activation, Rusty claims that if SegWit doesn't activate, something is badly broken in Bitcoin. While there have been no significant technical objections to SegWit, some miners are afraid of losing their fee-gathering monopoly for moving money to layer2-actors. In response to concerns about the security problems only related to watching the blockchain, Rusty confirms that the problem is outsourcing and explains that you cannot hand the outsourcer a penalty transaction signature if you don't know what the bad transaction will look like. However, this leads to the question of whether there is an alternative LN-Level2 without SegWit but still with CSV. It is suggested that Spillman-style payment channels could be used instead of revocation methods, but they use nLockTime, which is vulnerable to malleability. The possibility of creating OP_CLTV/OP_CSV-style channels that are malleability-resistant without using revocation methods is raised.