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copiratetoday at 9:28 AM1 replyview on HN

With the Lightning network, L2 is basically a database between only 2 parties that are required to be online during the transaction. It's not possible to double spend in that situation.

There's the possibility of double spending by committing to the bitcoin blockchain an old version of your "database", but then you would face the penalty of having your entire balance confiscated by the other party.

More details here: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/67141/how-is-a-d...


Replies

tsimionescutoday at 9:54 AM

> but then you would face the penalty of having your entire balance confiscated by the other party.

Only if the other party notices in time that you did this. You are reliant on active monitoring of the blockchain to know that your transactions actually happened. And the more you want to scale (i.e. the more transactions you do on a single Lightning channel without settling it on the BTC blockchain), the bigger the risk becomes.

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