Building Secure and Watchtower-efficient Bitcoin Payment Channels with BitVMX
BitVMX can enable secure and watchtower-efficient Bitcoin payment channels through efficient state revocations.Using Schnorr signatures for revocation messages and one-time signatures (OTS) for state commitments, we create a dispute resolution mechanism where outdated states can be penalized.Unlike Lightning Network watchtowers that store data for every state update, BitVMX watchtowers require only O(1) storage per channel by maintaining just the latest revocation message. The system supports Hash Time-Locked Contracts (HTLCs) for routing and uses a directed acyclic graph of transactions for secure off-chain operations with minimal on-chain footprint.This presentation highlights the extensibility of BitVMX in constructing secure and efficient off-chain Bitcoin protocols.
