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.
[1]
Jurgen Kurths,et al.
Rewiring hierarchical scale-free networks: Influence on synchronizability and topology
,
2017,
1707.04057.
[2]
Christian Decker,et al.
A Fast and Scalable Payment Network with Bitcoin Duplex Micropayment Channels
,
2015,
SSS.
[3]
Justin Zhan,et al.
Measuring Topological Anonymity in Social Networks
,
2007
.
[4]
Michele Bellingeri,et al.
Robustness of weighted networks
,
2018
.
[5]
Lisa Singh,et al.
Measuring Topological Anonymity in Social Networks
,
2007,
2007 IEEE International Conference on Granular Computing (GRC 2007).