← 研踪 PaperTrailarXiv:2611.16311 · v1
What Does It Cost to Force-Close a Lightning Channel? Evidence from 974,000 Channel Closes, 2018-2026
首次提交 2026-11-12 13:13
版本更新 2026-11-12 13:13
雷达观测 2026-11-13 14:16
摘要
Bitcoin's Lightning payment network returns the funds of a channel that cannot close cooperatively through pre-signed transactions whose fees and delays fall on its operators. That fee design is being replaced: Bitcoin Core 31.0 removed the mempool rule anchor channels relied on, and the Lightning specification adopted zero-fee commitments in May 2026. What the old design costs has never been measured across fee regimes. We trace every public channel close and every force close on-chain from January 2018 to October 2026, 973,581 closes, and follow each output to its spend. A separate chain index confirms all 698,476 public closes we could compare. Fee spikes did not bring a wave of force closes. Force closes in a spike week and the next were 0.97 times the four weeks before, against 1.02 after ordinary weeks of the same years. A force close costs 2-6 times a cooperative close in fees and locks the closer's balance for days, which outweighs the fees only in low-fee years. When fees are high, pending payments are exposed: in 2023, 18.2% of HTLC timeouts confirmed more than 40 blocks after expiry. Yet since 2021, forwarding nodes lost only 38 payments, each with the preimage already on-chain. Anchor outputs cut late timeouts in fee spikes (20.6% against 30.5%), yet owners rarely bump commitments with them, and miners take most of what third parties sweep. Zero-fee commitments would save only 12% of the anchor mechanism's block space; they should be judged by how promptly payments resolve when fees spike.
作者备注：14 pages, 8 figures, 8 tables. Code and aggregate data: https://github.com/bitcoindatalabs/ln-force-close-costs
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v1 · 2026-11-12 13:13 · 最新观测版本
What Does It Cost to Force-Close a Lightning Channel? Evidence from 974,000 Channel Closes, 2018-2026
Bitcoin's Lightning payment network returns the funds of a channel that cannot close cooperatively through pre-signed transactions whose fees and delays fall on its operators. That fee design is being replaced: Bitcoin Core 31.0 removed the mempool rule anchor channels relied on, and the Lightning specification adopted zero-fee commitments in May 2026. What the old design costs has never been measured across fee regimes. We trace every public channel close and every force close on-chain from January 2018 to October 2026, 973,581 closes, and follow each output to its spend. A separate chain index confirms all 698,476 public closes we could compare. Fee spikes did not bring a wave of force closes. Force closes in a spike week and the next were 0.97 times the four weeks before, against 1.02 after ordinary weeks of the same years. A force close costs 2-6 times a cooperative close in fees and locks the closer's balance for days, which outweighs the fees only in low-fee years. When fees are high, pending payments are exposed: in 2023, 18.2% of HTLC timeouts confirmed more than 40 blocks after expiry. Yet since 2021, forwarding nodes lost only 38 payments, each with the preimage already on-chain. Anchor outputs cut late timeouts in fee spikes (20.6% against 30.5%), yet owners rarely bump commitments with them, and miners take most of what third parties sweep. Zero-fee commitments would save only 12% of the anchor mechanism's block space; they should be judged by how promptly payments resolve when fees spike.
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