Intro: The Lightning Network
I want this to be an introduction to the Lightning Network. It’s a very exciting thing that’s been going on with the Lightning Network, but many people outside of the Bitcoin space don’t know about it. In fact, you’ll often hear supporters of DeFi and BSV and other altcoins say that the Lightning Network is just vaporware. The lightning network is a fast, cheap network that was built on top of the Bitcoin network. It is what you might call a “layer 2 solution.”
The lightning network is an open network of nodes running lightning network software. It uses the same digital asset as the Bitcoin network. This is very important. It uses BTC, which is limited in supply. This is how the lightning network works. The Lightning Network also offers a fair amount of privacy, but that’s a deep rabbit hole that I’ll have to explain at some point. In addition to being fairly private, the Lightning Network is also very fast and cheap. For example, you can buy a cup of coffee with it in milliseconds, and transaction fees are usually a few pennies at most and often less than a penny. So far, there are about 5120 Bitcoin transacting in the lightning network, which is worth just over $100 million.
This seems like a very small amount of money, especially for a payment processing network, but as we’ll see, this is the amount of Bitcoin that’s locked up in there, and we don’t really know how much value is being transferred because Bitcoin can move back and forth in the channels without anyone knowing what’s going on inside there.
Unlike the Bitcoin Network, transactions on the Lightning Network are not broadcast to the whole network. Because of this, no one knows exactly how many transactions happen on it. We can see these maps of channels and nodes, but we don’t really know what’s going on inside those channels. Another thing to watch out for is when we see the number of channels. Just yesterday, it was announced that users of CashApp can now send and receive Bitcoin payments over the lightning Network. This gives you two ways to interact with the lightning Network without having to set up your own node. This is very exciting!! To be able to allow anyone in the world to use the lightning network with a simple user interface.
There’s also a company called impervious that has made a browser that runs on top of lightning. I’ll link to it below so you can download it and try it out. It’s the world’s first Bitcoin lightning-native web browser, which is exciting because it can’t be blocked.
Final thoughts: “Where is ethereum beach? Where is cardano beach? Where is DeFi beach?” The only beaches with those names are the ones owned by founders who get rich by dumping their tokens on you, but Bitcoin Beach is for the people. If you go to the Bitcoin Beach website, you can see that people can pay their phone, water, and electric bills there.
Please remember a like and a follow for support!
