In this work, we revisit the severely limited throughput problem of cryptocurrencies and propose a novel rebalancing approach for Payment Channel Networks (PCNs). PCNs are a popular solution for increasing the blockchain throughput, however, their benefit depends on the overall users’ liquidity. Rebalancing mechanisms are the state-of-the-art approach to maintaining high liquidity in PCNs. However, existing opt-in rebalancing mechanisms exclude users that may assist in rebalancing for small service fees, leading to suboptimal solutions and under-utilization of the PCNs’ bounded liquidity. We introduce the first rebalancing approach for PCNs that includes all users, following an “all for one and one for all” design philosophy that yields optimal throughput. The proposed approach introduces a double-auction rebalancing problem, which we term Musketeer, where users can participate as buyers (paying fees to rebalance) or sellers (charging fees to route transactions). The desired properties tailored to the unique characteristics of PCNs are formally defined, including the novel property of cyclic budget balance that is a stronger variation of strong budget balance. Basic results derived from auction theory, including an impossibility and multiple mechanisms that either achieve all desiderata under a relaxed model or sacrifice one of the properties, are presented. We also propose a novel mechanism that leverages time delays as an additional cost to users. This mechanism is provably truthful, cyclic budget balanced, individually rational, and economic efficient but only with respect to liquidity.

We revisit the severely limited throughput problem of cryptocurrencies and propose a novel rebalancing approach for Payment Channel Networks (PCNs). PCNs are a popular solution for increasing the blockchain throughput, however, their benefit depends on the overall users' liquidity. Rebalancing mechanisms are the state-of-the-art approach to maintaining high liquidity PCNs. However, existing opt-in rebalancing mechanisms exclude users that may assist in rebalancing for small service fees, leading to suboptimal solutions and under-utilization of the PCNs' bounded liquidity.

Payment channel networks (PCNs) are one of the most prominent solutions to the limited transaction throughput of blockchains. Nevertheless, PCNs suffer themselves from a throughput limitation due to the capital constraints of their channels. A similar dependence on high capital is also found in inter-bank payment settlements, where the so-called netting technique is used to mitigate liquidity demands.

We consider the task of proving integer infeasibility of a bounded convex K in ℝⁿ using a general branching proof system. In a general branching proof, one constructs a branching tree by adding an integer disjunction 𝐚𝐱 ≤ b or 𝐚𝐱 ≥ b+1, 𝐚 ∈ ℤⁿ, b ∈ ℤ, at each node, such that the leaves of the tree correspond to empty sets (i.e., K together with the inequalities picked up from the root to leaf is empty). Recently, Beame et al (ITCS 2018), asked whether the bit size of the coefficients in a branching proof, which they named stabbing planes (SP) refutations, for the case of polytopes derived from SAT formulas, can be assumed to be polynomial in n. We resolve this question in the affirmative, by showing that any branching proof can be recompiled so that the normals of the disjunctions have coefficients of size at most (n R)^O(n²), where R ∈ ℕ is the radius of an 𝓁₁ ball containing K, while increasing the number of nodes in the branching tree by at most a factor O(n). Our recompilation techniques works by first replacing each disjunction using an iterated Diophantine approximation, introduced by Frank and Tardos (Combinatorica 1986), and proceeds by "fixing up" the leaves of the tree using judiciously added Chvátal-Gomory (CG) cuts. As our second contribution, we show that Tseitin formulas, an important class of infeasible SAT instances, have quasi-polynomial sized cutting plane (CP) refutations. This disproves a conjecture that Tseitin formulas are (exponentially) hard for CP. Our upper bound follows by recompiling the quasi-polynomial sized SP refutations for Tseitin formulas due to Beame et al, which have a special enumerative form, into a CP proof of the same length using a serialization technique of Cook et al (Discrete Appl. Math. 1987). As our final contribution, we give a simple family of polytopes in [0,1]ⁿ requiring exponential sized branching proofs.