alt Hacker News> 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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npoc • today at 10:12 AM
If monitoring really is a problem isn't simple automation the solution?
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Yes, but as long as you monitor, double spending is not possible. And it's possible to use tools to do that somewhat passively.
There are conditions on every payment system. With bitcoin you also have something to do to prevent double spending: wait for some number of confirmations (and making sure you're on the right chain).
And "double-spend protection guarantees of blockchains" is very dependent on the cost of doing a 51% attack, so it's not strong by itself. It's very strong in bitcoin only because the quantity of hashrate/money required to do one is astronomical. It's not so strong on small blockchains.
And I fail to see how the risk increases with more transactions on a single lightning channel.