Compare
Four documents, the same five questions.
No throughput league table and no yield. The cells are what this library is willing to say about the text.
| Question | Bitcoin Payment Channels |
|---|---|
| What the text proposes | Two parties lock coins in a shared output and exchange updated transactions that are not broadcast. Only the last state, or a dispute, hits the chain. |
| Who may write | Mike Hearn and Jeremy Spilman |
| What is settled | The lock is on-chain. The updates are off-chain. |
| Load-bearing assumption | This early design is not the Lightning protocol. |
| What this library says afterwards | A reading of the public document. Not a copy of it, and not a claim about a later network that reused the name. |
| Rights | Official external source only |