Bitcoin is the world’s most popular cryptocurrency with a market cap of $125 billion, and Bitcoin developers are always finding ways to make the payments more useful and easy. They are still trying to update the procedures and this time the Lightning Network was added to Bitcoin as one of the major projects.
New things are introduced in the systems, so they are always going through slight changes as they slowly adapt to the system. However, some serious security vulnerabilities were discovered in the Bitcoin Lightning Network, and if the nodes of the system are not upgraded, users can end up losing their Bitcoins.
Rusty Russell, the software developer behind the Bitcoin’s Lightning Network protocol, revealed the issues. He shared the information that there were specific issues with the security of the lightning projects, which could cause loss of funds in the future. He further advised the users to upgrade their systems and that the details about the issues will be released in 4 weeks.
The details about the vulnerability will be revealed to the public by 27th September. The delay is just a common practice in the tech world where it gives the developers time to patch the problems and prevents exploitation of bugs.
Russell also advised the users to update the lightning-ready Bitcoin wallet, Eclair. Lightning Network was first proposed in 2015 by Thaddeus Dryja and Joseph Poon. It helps to create a layer on top of the Bitcoin blockchain where transactions will be passed before they are stored in the main blockchain.
This helps in increasing the transaction speeds, and the costs of the process are reduced along with this.
