Lightning in a Bottle
Zack Voell - January 17, 2019
Three years ago this week, Joseph Poon and Thaddeus Dryja formally introduced one of the most widely accepted, elegant scaling solutions for blockchains: the Lightning Network. Designed to preserve a trust-minimized network while shifting throughput load off of the main chain, Lightning is a protocol-agnostic network of bidirectional micropayment channels.
In English, this means every transaction doesn’t need to be processed on-chain, which results in network congestion, high fees, and other bad things.
Instead, small payments, metered payments, or bilateral payments between trusted third-parties, can be processed instantly and cheaply via Lightning, one layer “above” the blockchain in the Bitcoin (or any other UTXO-based digital asset’s) stack.
Developer and investor attention to the Lightning network has grown steadily over the last few years but positively exploded through the second half of 2018 with over 5,000 nodes and 20,000 channels.
There’s now endless chatter on Twitter, Medium, Telegram, and in interviews on the endless roster of crypto podcasts making Lightning easily one of the most watched developments as crypto kicks off 2019.
A few efforts in particular have piqued the interest of larger, less-technical audiences interested in crypto: the plug-and-play Lightning node from Casa, a browser extension for seamless invoice processing from Joule, an “easiest Bitcoin Lightning guide”explainer from Pierre Rochard, and the viral Satoshi’s Place internet art commons.
Keeping pace with the excitement is tough even with a strong, general interest in learning more new developments.
Every day we see chatter from crypto users on Twitter and in chatrooms asking for resources on this topic or an explainer on that topic relevant to Lightning. And we wanted to help. To that end, we’ve released the most user-friendly and comprehensive resource page on Lightning on the Internet. Learning about Lightning should be easy and accessible, and we’re excited to release our effort to make this happen.
On our page, you’ll find everything from dozens of highly technical explainers and developer resources to step-by-step beginner guides and a catalogue of online games powered by Lightning. You’ll also see every important and relevant social media group, blog, newsletter, and forum thread is also there. As the network, its users, and products grow, so will our page.
Of course, if you find something we’ve missed, ping us and we’ll add it. But for now, be our guest and dive headlong into the Lightning Network rabbit hole.
There’s a lot to learn.