Flare Lightning Network New Routing System White Paper Released, Making Node Routing More Efficient (Full White Paper Download)

BitFury and the open-source Lightning Network community have jointly released a white paper (full white paper download) that explores how the micropayment protocol under development can more efficiently route bitcoin payments between users.

Although the Lightning Network has had its share of problems, it is one of the most widely acclaimed proposals for scaling the bitcoin network. The 40-page white paper introduces a new routing system, called Flare, that mixes existing strategies for discovering and selecting paths in decentralized systems.

In general, the best description of the Flare system is: a solution for how the Lightning Network manages the balance between performance, scalability, and centralization, while providing a network model that is not subject to malicious behavior.

In interviews, BitFury and members of the Lightning Network community viewed the white paper as a successful collaboration that shows different stakeholders in the bitcoin community are coming together to overcome difficult technical challenges.

BitFury hailed the Lightning Network as an “unparalleled scaling solution for the Bitcoin network” that could support financial inclusion and non-financial uses of blockchain technology.

“We decided to work with the Lightning Network team on this project because we believe that Lightning will bring scalability to the Bitcoin blockchain, increasing the number of transactions that the current blockchain can support by several orders of magnitude,” said Bitfury CEO Valery Vavilov.

The white paper, published today and co-authored by Bitfury researchers Pavel Prihodko, Slava Zhigulin, Mykola Sahno and Aleksei Ostrovskiy, as well as new Lightning employee Olaoluwa Osuntokun, proposes a new way for the Lightning Network to map routing paths and perform routing on demand.

In simpler terms, Lightning Network co-founder Joseph Poon believes that the white paper will move the Lightning Network away from early hub and spoke routing models, which have been criticized by the community for potentially causing the node network to become more centralized.

“With payment channels, there could be millions or tens of thousands of nodes connected to each other,” Pan said. “This allows us to explore how the network can find a path from a sender to a receiver in a decentralized way.”

node

Perhaps the most important new concept introduced by the Flare scheme is the concept of having a Lightning Network node also act as a ‘ beacon node ’, which will provide visibility to other nodes within a local radius.

Osuntokun explained that instead of creating a hierarchy of nodes, Flare will allow nodes to elect other nodes as ‘landmark nodes’ that will help others determine how to manage the steps required to route a payment.

“Thus, a node’s view of the network is like battlefield smoke, with strong visibility close to the local radius, and probing farther out through random probing,” the white paper reads. “This allows a node to maintain routing state with space complexity logarithmic with respect to the total network size, while ensuring reachability of all other nodes with high probability.”

However, Osuntokun sought to emphasize that this is just one possible solution for Lightning Network routing, and that the team behind it is openly accepting feedback.

“We don’t expect this to be the only right way,” Pan said. “I think this strategy works well for Bitcoin’s purpose and will lead to iterative improvements.”

Pan also believes that the ongoing work on the Lightning Network could have a more far-reaching impact on mesh networks, and therefore the internet.

He continued: “If you have a mesh network and you want to pay your neighbors for routing to the internet, you can use the same technology for very clear uses.”

Simulation Phase

While the development of the Lightning Network has taken another step forward, all parties acknowledged that the proposal is still in the simulation stage and that more work needs to be done to validate the technology.

In the white paper, BitFury and the Lightning Network community estimate that the Lightning Network could scale to accommodate millions of users, a number that may not be enough to accommodate all current Bitcoin users.

The white paper states: “Simulation results show that the number of paths stored in the Lightning Network can only reach approximately the square root of the number of network nodes. For a network with 100,000 nodes, the stored paths can only accommodate 600 nodes.”

In addition, the white paper shows that how to successfully deploy the Lightning Network is still a problem. For example, one issue that needs to be solved is how the network can incentivize a large number of nodes around the world to go online at the same time.

The white paper also weighs in on future challenges, discussing how scaling these nodes is another challenge.

“Unless the network operates efficiently, there will be little incentive for people to put their Bitcoin into Lightning Network channels,” the white paper states. “Ideally, a broad range of industry and community participants would use Lightning Network nodes to help bootstrap the network.”

BitFury's New Direction

The white paper also represents a major investment by BitFury, a bitcoin mining specialist that has been diversifying into blockchain technology.

For example, Vavilov said that the Lightning Network is now "one of the top priorities" for the company, and they will continue to research and test the Flare routing system. Vavilov said that the company has five full-time employees dedicated to the Lightning Network and future software products.

Vavilov also said that if it succeeds, he thinks it could be possible to commercialize its results. "We are in the early stages of testing and research. If the Lightning Network is successful, there will be a lot of potential uses and opportunities for commercialization."

He added: “We are very interested in improving the scalability of the Bitcoin blockchain and will continue to explore partnerships to achieve this scalability.”