The last two “long” articles of this blog were dedicated to special kinds of Lightning channels that seek, each in their own way, to enhance the user experience on the Lightning Network. This week, we will dive into anchor outputs, which aim to ensure channel closings are settled quicly, even in the case of a force close. This article will go into details as to how Lightning works in this regard, what are the issues and how anchor outputs can solve them....
Last week’s article dealt with Turbo Channels. Today, I’ll cover Hosted Channels, another kind of channels that seek to enhance the Lightning channels UX while staying in line with the specification and mitigating the required tradeoffs. Not on-chain enforceable channels The big difference between a hosted channel and a regular Lightning channel is that the former is not enforceable on-chain, simply because there is no channel opening transaction to spend from....
Turbo channels have been around since at least 2 years now, but they remain quite largely misunderstood among the community. Information about them are available but a bit scattered. The purpose of this post is to bring them together and provide a comprehensive view on this subject. 0-conf channels Turbo channels are basically 0-confirmation channels, which means the channel can be used before the channel opening transaction get mined in a Bitcoin block....