The evolution of Lightning Network's Topology during its first year and the influence over its core values
This work addresses scalability and cost issues in Bitcoin for users and developers, but it appears incremental as it focuses on observational analysis without introducing new methods.
The study analyzed the topological evolution of the Lightning Network (LN) during its first year on Bitcoin's mainnet to assess its impact on core Bitcoin values like resilience against attacks, user anonymity, and synchronization ease.
It is now a whole year since Lightning Network (LN) has been launched on the Bitcoi's mainnet. LN has been claimed as the solution for several of Bitcoin's weaknesses such as its difficulty to scale in number of transactions per second and its expensiveness for relative small amount exchanged. LN is based upon a network of micro-channels opened and closed by issuing transactions on the Blockchain and capable to interact among themselves thanks to the Multi-hop framework. In this work I analysed the evolution of LN from its topological point of view and tried to understand how it impacts over some of Bitcoin's historical core foundamentals such as the resilience against attacks and failures and the user's anonymity. Another question I have tried to answer is whether the evolution of LN's topology will make its synchronization easier.