I have been working hard to understand how Lightning works..
With great help from r/bitcoin and Bitcointalk I have put together a Lightning FAQ:
The final result of my work can be found here:
https://medium.com/@AudunGulbrands1/lightning-faq-67bd2b957d70#.8biw0wadfHowever, some people have pointed out to me; that it may become expensive to close a Lightning channel, since this will require an on-chain transaction.
I just read the following article in Bitcoin Magazine:
“The Power of Schnorr: The Signature Algorithm to Increase Bitcoin's Scale and Privacy”
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/the-power-of-schnorr-the-signature-algorithm-to-increase-bitcoin-s-scale-and-privacy-1460642496To summarize;
My understanding of Schnorr and CoinJoin is the following:
Schnorr will allow several signatures to be aggregated into a single, new signature.
Many inputs normally means many signatures, but Schnorr will require only one combined signature to represent all these different signatures.
This means that only one signature must be included in a transaction.
CoinJoin allows different users to combine all their transactions into a single transaction.
Schnorr can enable all participants in a CoinJoin transaction to not only combine their transactions, but to also combine their signatures.
So my question is:
Can Schnorr and CoinJoin be built into Lightning in such a way that several channels can be closed with just one transaction?
So to reduce the cost of closing by having many channels share the cost of just one transaction?