Lightning Network, an innovation by Lightning Labs is the main hope for professedly bitcoin’s scaling issues. However it is currently facing some delays as only a handful of developers are working to make it a reality.
Recently, a group of 26 universities known as the Bsafe.network launched a contest with an undisclosed prize to entice people to evaluate bitcoin’s layer two technologies, namely “Lightning.”
One of the reasons for this contest is to encourage engineers, students, and professors. It aims to measure the security and privacy of the network. “Collect attack models” that bad actors could use to disrupt payments going over the Lightning Network. LN is a technology to scale bitcoin and potentially reduce fees.
This extra boost in scrutiny comes at a time when users and developers are anxious for Lightning to launch for real.
Against the recommendations of Lightning Network developers for early adopters to only use the technology on the testnet with dummy coins, a handful of eager users and developers have begun playing around with the technology with real bitcoin. Some of these intrepid testers have even lost a little money in the process. A few companies, such as VPN providerTorGuard, already accept Lightning Network payments.
The competition intends to improve the cryptography standards commonly used across the internet to secure data, such as AES and SHA-3, said Bsafe.network co-founder and Georgetown University research professor Shin’ichiro Matsuo.
According to Matsuo:”We think many enhancements of Lightning Network will come through this competition.”
Matsuo also said he also hopes the submissions will shine a light on the security and privacy of the technology. Also how it will interact with the cryptocurrency’s “layer one.”
Because no one can know how the technology will be used or exploited at scale, this contest could help. By asking for proposals from all over the world. Matsuo believes the competitive atmosphere will help to shed light on what the precise trade-offs are. The proposal may further be analyzed by academics from some different countries and fields,
“Layer-two technologies such as the Lightning Network are needed to enhance the scalability of payments over the bitcoin blockchain. But they might change the trust model, meaning Lightning Network might not be wholly decentralized,” he said.
Once after the submissions are judged and awarded, the Bsafe.network plans to “disclose all of the evaluations”. And open-source all the code so the bitcoin community can pick through it and learn from the results.
But beyond improving the Lightning Network, Matsuo hopes Bsafe.network will have another broader impact on the bitcoin and blockchain industry.
Matsuo wants this contest to be only the first of many and wants to grow the network of universities that are part of the group, to make its reach even more diverse.
“With 26 universities and growing, doing this type of open competition gives us a neutral result to compare that kind of technology,” he said.
“We already have this for cryptography. But for bitcoin and blockchain, we need a more neutral way of analyzing the technology.”
He hopes that sometime in the future, Bsafe.network becomes a voice in the blockchain industry that provides guidance. Further, it answers to the very many questions in the space by conducting debates, competitions and by providing technical analysis.
Also Read: Bulgaria’s Varna University of Management to offer Bitcoin scholarships
Source of the article: https://coinpedia.org/news/battle-testing-lightning-26-schools-secure-bitcoins-layer-2
