That does not sound correct on the lightning network. I cannot find any reason it would allow someone to run off with your funds. Can you explain the attack?
Most consumers will not want to do this because they don't know who they will be buying from and don't know how much they are going to spend. If they decide they want to buy from random website Z one day, making a lightning network connection between themselves and that website will be useless because establishing a lightning network connection needs to go on the regular slow block chain, so it'll take as long as a regular payment.
The only way it works is if a major exchange like Coinbase sets up lightning network agreements between other major exchanges. Then the user puts bitcoin into Coinbase and uses the Coinbase website to make lightning network payments on your behalf. This means you will probably put all your money into an exchange like Coinbase who can then run off with your money.
If it was just some crap exchange, why would anyone be bothering, and especially why would it be taking so long?
They need to commit regular bitcoin into a lightning network channel on the main blockchain before they can spend it.
The "network" part of lightning network allows you to make a payment to anyone else on the network (trustlessly) through multiple hops. For example, if you opened a channel with a friend, and your friend had a channel open with Starbucks, you would be able to pay Starbucks through your friend without having to trust your friend.
And this works today. I have one channel open on the lightning network, and regularly make payments to random nodes on the network. I pay << $0.01 in fees for these transactions, and they settle in ~a second.
What if the trust chain is 20 users long?
Who's going to spend the resources to find this chain? And has it been tested to scale, or is it just like Bitcoin in the early days where people said it would scale and never tested it?
People are going to gravitate to putting all their money into a large exchange like Coinbase to avoid these problems.
Every hop only knows the previous and next one, nothing else, not even the length of the chain.
Your computer/phone finds the route and if you’re ok with privacy trade off you can outsource this task to your hub for a fee in single satoshis.
People are going to gravitate towards convenient solutions making all sorts of security, privacy and financial risks, that’s why it’s important to have multiple alternatives with different trade offs.
Large centralized lightning nodes will form and they will act like banks and be able to stop payments to arbitrary entities like Paypal, and even make the payment get stuck for days or weeks depending on how long the timeout is.
From the paper itself.
"the network will look a lot like the correspondent banking network"
You need to find a path because path needs to have channel capacity required for your transaction, that’s why you can’t pick random nodes, not because you want to trust them.
Stealing somebody’s funds from channel is just as hard as stealing bitcoin - you need to crack encryption or you need a private key.
You have no idea how lightning works, please do some reading before making incorrect claims.
Each node can still steal money from the node next to them by turning hostile such as not passing the secret and closing out their channel and getting time locks to expire, which is many magnitudes easier than cracking encryption or stealing a private key. The network has already been DDoSed. Now imagine the incentive to do it when it handles millions of dollars.
Do you not see the contradiction in your statement? You can’t spend your htlc without revealing the secret to the other party. If your stealing procedure involves ddosing random unknown party from being able to access any internet whatsoever to lock them out of minuscule amounts lightning payments are used for - good luck with that.
You only need to ddos the lightning network so it won't record their HTLC when it expires. There is no need to ddos them, though I would argue it would be equally easy to do. And so while the other party will eventually see the secret on the block chain, they can't get their HTLC unlocked on the network before it expires.
And the lightning network has already been easily ddosed! We will see it happen more often if the lightning network ever gets bigger. This isn't some hypothetical situation.
this is not even a thing. lightning network is collection of independent nodes, there is no registry of payments and channels, every node keeps their own record.
> And so while the other party will eventually see the secret on the block chain, they can't get their HTLC unlocked on the network before it expires.
why? if a party is stuck in a payment and especially if they notice they are getting attacked - they will take steps to mitigate. the moment commitment with secret is broadcast and in the worst case - the moment it gets confirmed on chain the other party will know the secret and can unlock their htlc. the risk is essentially the same as with deep reorgs - very low because those are very rare events. and the hassle is most definitely not worth the value of a stolen micropayment, which is the primary purpose of LN.