Designing a Privacy-Preserving Rebalancing Algorithm for Payment Channel Networks

In the past 8 years, Bitcoin has dominated the cryptocurrency markets and drawn attention from academia, developers and legislators alike. Bitcoin has been praised for its impact on decentralizing trust and currencies but also criticized for its volatility and energy-inefficient consensus mechanism. To improve its limitations, in 2016, payment...

Splitting Payments to Increase Blockchain Effectiveness

Blockchain technology is the underlying mechanism that many cryptocurrencies operate on. It relies on cryptographic techniques that enforce integrity on transaction records. The records (blocks) stored are limited in size and frequency. One well-known issue regarding blockchain technology is the lack of scalability. In order to mitigate this...

Improving Blockchain Anonymity Using Hop Changes with Partial Route Computation

The Lightning Network aims to solve Bitcoin's scalability problem by providing a way to transact with minimal use of the blockchain. Instead, payments are routed over payment channel networks. This routing is done by LN clients, which use cost functions to compute the optimal transaction path. With the use of onion routing, LN tries to hide the...

How Lightning's Routing Diminishes its Anonymity

Lightning, the prevailing solution to Bitcoin's scalability issue, uses onion routing to hide senders and recipients of payments. Yet, the path between the sender and the recipient along which payments are routed is selected such that it is short, cost efficient, and fast. The low degree of randomness in the path selection entails that...