I’m launching a Lightning Network on BCA mainnet
It is already fully functional and everyone is welcome to try it out.
Bitcoin Atom info:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2515675.0
Atom Lightning Wallet on Google Play:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lightning.walletapp.bca
Atom Lightning Wallet sources:
https://github.com/btcontract/lnwallet-atom
Eclair Atom binaries and sources:
https://github.com/btcontract/eclair-atom/releases
A tipping widget to spend your BCA:
http://bcatip.lightning-wallet.com/
Why doing this?
First and foremost, I want LN to be readily available in places where miners have less censorship power by design because LN critically relies on refunding on-chain transactions to be confirmed in a reasonable time-frame or else a race condition becomes possible where an attacker may steal a part of channel balance and get away with it.
Current LN refunding transactions are easily discernible and we have just a handful of large miner pools who technically can stop processing some or all of them. While it may seem like pulling off this type of attack is not in pools’ best interest we should never forget that powerful miner supported forks do exist. Large mining companies such as Bitmain openly despise Bitcoin so given the right market conditions they may attempt to play games with LN in order to lure investors into BCH where they have total control.
BCA uses PoW/PoS consensus which may have issues of it’s own but it does give businesses and investors a direct means to keep LN going even if miners don’t want it to, by an option of pushing refunding transactions via PoS blocks. Functional Lightning Network based on a hybrid consensus should remind miner monopolists that there are many places where investors could go in case of what, including those where miners have less power, not more.
Second, I want to try various approaches which currently seem nonviable on BTC based LN and see how they play out:
- toSelfDelay of up to 8640 blocks is accepted thus turning “online at least once a day” rule into “online at least once per two months”. The upside is this effectively eliminates the need for watchtowers, the downside is up to 2 months of waiting if peer becomes unresponsive and you close a channel uncooperatively.
- Maximum channel capacity of ~0.16 BTC is removed in BCA which hopefully will increase liquidity and remove unnecessary load from blockchain and LN routing graph.
- BCA nodes are very tolerant to fee-rate disparity and accept a difference of up to 150 times. Low fee-rate tolerance is currently one of the main reasons for broken channels on BTC mainnet.
Of course, LN does not have a global consensus and I won’t be able to enforce these rules once new nodes start joining but judging from BTC experience node operators tend to adhere to default settings so these rules stand a good chance of taking off.
I may be wrong about everything but there seem to be no downside in doing this. LN success on BCA will reward every Bitcoin investor and strengthen it’s success on BTC while failure of any kind will supply us with knowledge about what should not be done.
