Bitfury Group, in collaboration with the open-source Lightning Network community, has released a white paper that explores how the in-development micropayments protocol could more effectively route bitcoin payments between users when launched.
Long an outstanding question facing the Lightning Network , one of the more acclaimed proposals aimed at scaling the bitcoin network to accommodate higher transaction volumes, the 40-page white paper introduces a new routing system it calls Flare, which employs a hybrid of existing strategies for path discovery and selection in decentralized systems.
Overall, the system is perhaps best described as a proposal for how the Lightning Network could manage trade-offs between performance, scalability and centralization while offering a network model that does not assume hostile behavior.
In interview, members of both Bitfury and the Lightning Network community sought to position the paper as a successful collaboration that shows how different stakeholders in the bitcoin community are coming together to forge ahead on difficult technical challenges.
For its part, Bitfury lauded the Lightning Network as an "unparalleled solution" to scaling the bitcoin blockchain, one that it would support as a way to enable financial inclusion, as well as non-financial uses of blockchain technology.
"We decided to collaborate with the Lightning Network team on this project because we believe the Lightning Network will bring scalability to the bitcoin blockchain that is of orders of magnitude beyond what the blockchain can currently support," Bitfury CEO Valery Vavilov told CoinDesk.
The paper, released today, was authored by Bitfury researchers Pavel Prihodko, Slava Zhigulin, Mykola Sahno and Aleksei Ostrovskiy, as well as new Lightning employee Olaoluwa Osuntokun. It presents a new way for how Lightning Networks could map routing paths, as well as execute routing on-demand.
In more simplistic terms, Lightning co-founder Joseph Poon described the paper as one that moves Lightning Network away from the earlier hub-and-spoke […]
