Proposal To Stop Bitcoin Lightning Attacks – Bitcoin Magazine

This is an opinion editorial by Shinobi, a self-taught educator in the Bitcoin space and tech-oriented Bitcoin podcast host.

Channel jamming is one of the most threatening outstanding problems with the Lightning Network. It presents an open mechanism to denial-of-service attack nodes on the network to prevent them from routing, losing them money while their liquidity is locked up and unable to forward payments that will earn them fees. An attacker can route a payment through other nodes from themselves to themselves, and refuse to finalize the payment. This makes that liquidity useless for forwarding other payments until the hashed timelock contract (HTLC) timelock expires and the payment refunds.