If only one could prove that he won’t get into a boating accident. e
> On Jul 5, 2021, at 16:26, ZmnSCPxj via bitcoin-dev > <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote: > > Good morning Billy, > >> I wonder if there would be some way to include the ability to prove balances >> held on the lightning network, but I suspect that isn't generally possible. > > Thinking about this in terms of economic logic: > > Every channel is anchored onchain, and that anchor (the funding txout) is > proof of the existence, and size, of the channel. > > The two participants in the channel can sign a plaintext containing their > node pubkeys and how much each owns. > One of the participants should provably be the custodian. > > * If the counterparty is a true third party, it has no incentive to lie about > its money. > * Especially if the counterparty is *another* custodian who wants > proof-of-reserves, it has every incentive to overreport, but then the first > party will refuse to sign. > It has a disincentive to underreport, and would itself refuse to sign a > dishonest report that assigns more funds to the first party. > The only case that would be acceptable to both custodians would be to > honestly report their holdings in the Lightning channel. > * If the counterparty is a sockpuppet of the custodian, then the entire > channel is owned by the custodian and it would be fairly dumb of he custodian > to claim to have less funds than the entire channel. > > Perhaps a more practical problem is that Lightning channel states change > fairly quickly, and there are possible race conditions, due to network > latency (remember, both nodes need to sign, meaning both of them need to > communicate with each other, thus hit by network latency and other race > conditions) where a custodian Lightning node is unable to "freeze" a snapshot > of its current state and make an atomic proof-of-reserves of *all* channels. > > Regards, > ZmnSCPxj > _______________________________________________ > bitcoin-dev mailing list > bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org > https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev _______________________________________________ bitcoin-dev mailing list bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
