Critical Bug Discovered in Bitcoin's Lightning Network

Hello, this is Bitpunk. Today I'd like to talk about the Lightning Network. In short, the Lightning Network lets participants on slow blockchains like Bitcoin open individual channels with each other so they can send and receive funds faster. Recently, a critical bug was discovered in the Lightning Network.

In a public announcement on August 30, Bitcoin developer Rusty Russell said that "an attacker could open a Lightning payment channel, pay the other party nothing or only part of the funds, and request assets."

To explain the technical side a little, the Lightning Network is a Layer 2 payment protocol with fees close to zero, and it can process transactions at incredibly high speeds. For users to process transactions through the Lightning Network, they must open a "payment channel."

However, it appears that the verification of these channels wasn't thorough enough. An attacker could pretend to have opened a payment channel and send fake transactions. Meanwhile, the user on the other side, knowing nothing, would go ahead and send their own funds. It hasn't yet been confirmed how many victims there are.

Fortunately, the bug has been fixed in most of the major Lightning software. Everyone says Bitcoin itself is truly secure, but the services built around it still remain shaky. So it makes me wonder whether most cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, which set out to eliminate third-party intermediaries, actually depend on trustworthy third-party intermediaries more desperately than any other service.