面向区块链通道瞭望塔技术的研究

Research on Watchtower Technology for Block Chain Channel

当前主流加密货币如比特币和以太坊的吞吐量受限于其共识机制的出块速率,而修改其共识机制需要的周期很长.支付通道技术可使得主流加密货币在不修改共识机制的基础上有效提高区块链系统的吞吐量.在此情形下,需要通过用户阶段性上线以保障通道未被非法关闭,瞭望塔技术作为第三方为用户监视通道状态提供了支撑.但是,瞭望塔技术会受到数据存储、隐私保护、激励机制等因素的影响,为此,文章将对多种瞭望塔方案按照基础通道技术的不同进行分类,然后对这些方案从整体设计、数据存储、隐私保护等多角度进行分析与比较,并总结了这些方案的优缺点,最后针对当前瞭望塔技术的不足,提出了完善性的建议.

The throughput of current mainstream cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum is limited by the block-out rate of their consensus mechanism, which takes a long time to modify.Payment channel technology enables major cryptocurrencies to effectively increase the throughput of blockchain systems without modifying the consensus mechanism.In this case, users need to go online periodically to ensure that the channel is not illegally closed.As a third party, watchtower technology provides support for users to monitor the channel status.However, watchtower technology will be affected by data storage, privacy protection, incentive mechanism and other factors.Therefore, this paper will classify various watchtower schemes according to different basic channel technologies, and then analyze and compare these schemes from the overall design, data storage, privacy protection and other aspects, and summarize the advantages and disadvantages of these schemes.Finally, some suggestions are put forward to improve the technology of watchtower.