The Big List Of Lightning Network Resources
The Lightning Network is a “layer 2” payment protocol built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain. Its main purpose is to address Bitcoin’s scalability limitations by enabling faster, cheaper, and more efficient transactions through the use of off-chain payment channels.
The resources below are in chronological order. Click here for a separate list of Bitcoin-only resources, here for a list of blockchain resources, and here for a list of cryptography resources. Enjoy!
2016 – The Bitcoin Lightning Network: Scalable Off-Chain Instant Payments (Joseph Poon, Thaddeus Dryja) – https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf
2016 – What is the Lightning Network and how can it help Bitcoin scale? (Elizabeth Stark) – https://coincenter.org/entry/what-is-the-lightning-network
2016 – Understanding the Lightning Network: Building a bidirectional bitcoin payment channel (Aaron Van Wirdum) – https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/understanding-the-lightning-network-part-building-a-bidirectional-payment-channel-1464710791/
2016 – Understanding the Lightning Network: Creating the network (Aaron Van Wirdum) – https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/understanding-the-lightning-network-part-creating-the-network-1465326903
2016 – Understanding the Lightning Network: Completing the puzzle and closing the channel (Aaron Van Wirdum) – https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/understanding-the-lightning-network-part-completing-the-puzzle-and-closing-the-channel-1466178980
2016 – Lightning’s Balancing Act (Lopp) – https://blog.lopp.net/lightnings-balancing-act/
2018 – The Lightning Network PT 1 (Bitmex Research) – https://blog.bitmex.com/the-lightning-network/
2018 – The Lightning Network PT 2: Routing Fee Economics (Bitmex Research) – https://blog.bitmex.com/the-lightning-network-part-2-routing-fee-economics/
2018 – The Bitcoin Lightning Network: Technical Primer (Joe Kendzicky) – https://blog.usejournal.com/the-bitcoin-lightning-network-a-technical-primer-d8e073f2a82f
2018 – Neutrino: The Lighter Side of Lightning (Bryan Vu) – https://blog.lightning.engineering/posts/2018/10/17/neutrino.html
2019 – LockDown: Balance Availability Attack against Lightning Network Channels (Cristina Pérez-Solà, Alejandro Ranchal-Pedrosa, Jordi Herrera-Joancomartí, Guillermo Navarro-Arribas, Joaquin Garcia-Alfaro) – https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/1149.pdf
2019 – Discharged Payment Channels: Quantifying the Lightning Network’s Resilience to Topology-Based Attacks (Elias Rohrer, Julian Malliaris, Florian Tschorsch) – https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.10253
2019 – On the Difficulty of Hiding the Balance of Lightning Network Channels (Jordi Herrera-Joancomartí, Guillermo Navarro-Arribas, Alejandro Ranchal-Pedrosa, Cristina Pérez-Solà, Joaquin Garcia-Alfaro) – https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/328.pdf
2019 – Improvements of the Balance Discovery Attack on Lightning Network Payment Channels (Gijs van Dam, Rabiah Abdul Kadir, Puteri N. E. Nohuddin, Halimah Badioze Zaman) – https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/1385.pdf
2020 – An Empirical Analysis of Privacy in the Lightning Network (George Kappos, Haaroon Yousaf, Ania Piotrowska, Sanket Kanjalkar, Sergi Delgado-Segura, Andrew Miller, Sarah Meiklejohn) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.12470.pdf
2020 – [Lightning-dev] Pinning : The Good, The Bad, The Ugly (Antoine Riard) – https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/2020-June/002758.html
2020 – Probing Channel Balances in the Lightning Network (Sergei Tikhomirov, Rene Pickhardt, Alex Biryukov, Mariusz Nowostawski) – https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.00333
2020 – Time-Dilation Attacks on the Lightning Network (Antoine Riard, Gleb Naumenko) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.01418.pdf
2021 – Lightning Liquidity Management Guide (Lopp) – https://blog.lopp.net/lightning-network-liquidity-management-guide/
2021 – Tor-Only Bitcoin & Lightning Guide: A detailed guide to improving your privacy as a Lightning Network user (Lopp) – https://blog.lopp.net/tor-only-bitcoin-lightning-guide/
2021 – Analysis and Probing of Parallel Channels in the Lightning Network (Alex Biryukov, Gleb Naumenko, Sergei Tikhomirov) – https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/384.pdf
2021 – Optimally Reliable & Cheap Payment Flows on the Lightning Network (Rene Pickhardt, Stefan Richter) – https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.05322
2021 – Cross-Layer Deanonymization Methods in the Lightning Protocol (Matteo Romiti, Friedhelm Victor, Pedro Moreno-Sanchez, Peter Sebastian Nordholt, Bernhard Haslhofer, Matteo Maffei) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/2007.00764.pdf
2022 – Spamming the Lightning Network (Holton) – https://github.com/t-bast/lightning-docs/blob/master/spam-prevention.md
2023 – LND Overview and Developer Guide – https://dev.lightning.community/overview/
2023 – Lightning basics (Openoms) – https://www.lightningnode.info/readme
2023 – The Lightning “Merchant” Node Type (Openoms) – https://www.lightningnode.info/node-types/nodetype.merchant
2023 – The Lightning “Spending” Node Type (Openoms) – https://www.lightningnode.info/node-types/nodetype.spending
2023 – The Lightning “Routing” Node Type (Openoms) – https://www.lightningnode.info/node-types/nodetype.routing
2023 – Resources on Lightning privacy (Openoms) – https://www.lightningnode.info/privacy/resources
2023 – Connecting to a lightning node remotely (Openoms) – https://www.lightningnode.info/technicals/lightning.connect
2023 – A beginners guide to the Lightning Network (Bitcoiner) – https://bitcoiner.guide/lightning/
2023 – Lightning hardware recommendations (Openoms) – https://www.lightningnode.info/hardware-deployment/recommendations
Thanks for reading!