{"document_id":"BLC-STUDY-0176","slug":"payment-channels","title":"Bitcoin Payment Channels","authors":"Mike Hearn and Jeremy Spilman","year":2013,"date_label":"2013","publisher":"Mike Hearn and Jeremy Spilman","paper_type":"Design paper","category":"Interoperability","topics":["Interoperability"],"source_url":"https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Payment_channels","source_label":"Bitcoin wiki, early design","legacy_pdf_path":null,"sha256":null,"sha256_note":"No hash is published. This build does not store those PDF bytes, so a checksum would be invented. Where a legacy path exists, it points at the Internet Archive copy of the old library.","version":"Source cited by the 2013 study. The study is the reading. This page does not add a second essay.","doi":null,"rights_status":"Official external source only","source_status":"Official source","use_status":"Metadata and commentary only. The reading is the study page.","licence":null,"licence_label":"No licence recorded. Rights status under review.","full_text":null,"full_text_reason":"Full text is not published on this page. Public availability is not a licence to republish a document. Blockchain Lab has not recorded a licence that permits an HTML transcription, a training set, or a retrieval corpus of the paper. Text on this page is Blockchain Lab's own wording, or a pointer to a study that is also Blockchain Lab's wording.","editorial_line":"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.","canonical_url":"https://blockchainlab.com/whitepaper/payment-channels","record_url":"https://blockchainlab.com/research/corpus/papers/payment-channels","study_url":"https://blockchainlab.com/whitepaper/payment-channels","last_reviewed":"2026-10-01","last_checked":"2026-10-01","relationships":[{"rel":"Canonical reading","label":"Payment channels study","href":"/whitepaper/payment-channels"},{"rel":"Related paper","label":"Lightning","href":"/whitepaper/lightning"},{"rel":"Related paper","label":"Sprites","href":"/whitepaper/sprites"}]}