Topological Analysis of Bitcoin's Lightning Network
summary
A graph snapshot from Jan 3, 2019 shows the Lightning Network with >2000 nodes, >16,000 channels and ~500 BTC total capacity; average degree is ~7, diameter 6 and mean shortest path ≈2.8, but transitivity is low and degree assortativity is negative indicating a few hubs. The network follows a power‑law degree and is robust to random failure but weak to targeted attack: removing ~30 top hubs isolates ~400 nodes and the measured percolation threshold ≈14%. Follow‑ups demonstrate payment channel exhaustion/node isolation attacks; dataset and code are available.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:40Cryptocurrencies
- 3:12Scaling, scaling, scaling...
- 3:38Life of a payment channel
- 4:37Lightning Network in a nutshell
- 5:48Research questions
- 7:08It sure looks centralized to me...
- 7:28Basic graph theoretic properties
- 11:43Network Robustness
- 16:24Follow up work from Elias Rohrer et al.
- 18:56Dynamic Network Analysis (our follow-up work)
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