Bitfury Proposes a Solution to the Bitcoin Routing Problem in the Lightning Network

Bitfury just announced a white paper, in collaboration with Olaoluwa Osuntokun and others from the Lightning Network team, proposing a new algorithmic solution to Lightning Network’s routing problem.
A hybrid routing algorithm is proposed which, according to a press release, ensures that ‘routes can be found as quickly as possible.’ According to the whitepaper the algorithm uses a ‘proactive update of the node’s routing table,’ and a ‘reactive collection of information based on a routing request,’ allowing for connections between any payment channel.
The whitepaper states that the hybrid routing algorithm is compatible with onion, tor like, routing and is trustless: ‘its operation does not critically rely on presence of trusted parties in the network.’
Using a fog of war like design, the collected information by the routing algorithm ‘includes channels within a low hop-distance and paths to randomly selected nodes further away… As a result, a node will have a well-illuminated map of its local neighborhood within the network, with random patches of visibility further away enabled by the selection of beacon nodes.’

This post was published at Crypto Coins News on 07/07/2016.