  Payment channel networks, and the Lightning Network in particular, seem to
offer a solution to the lack of scalability and privacy offered by Bitcoin and
other blockchain-based cryptocurrencies. Previous research has focused on the
scalability, availability, and crypto-economics of the Lightning Network, but
relatively little attention has been paid to exploring the level of privacy it
achieves in practice. This paper presents a thorough analysis of the privacy
offered by the Lightning Network, by presenting several attacks that exploit
publicly available information about the network in order to learn information
that is designed to be kept secret, such as how many coins a node has available
or who the sender and recipient are in a payment routed through the network.
