Understanding the Lightning Network, Part 1: Building a Bidirectional Bitcoin Payment Channel

The Lightning Network is probably the most highly anticipated technological innovation that will be deployed on top of Bitcoin. The payment layer, first proposed by Joseph Poon and Tadge Dryja about a year ago, promises to support a virtually unlimited number of off-chain transactions among users, at nearly no cost – while leveraging the security offered by Bitcoin. At least three companies – Poon and Dryja's Lightning, Blockstream and Blockchain – are currently working on implementations of the technology. But few outside this small technological frontline fully grasp how the “future of....

The Lightning Network is the probably most highly anticipated technological innovation to be deployed on top of Bitcoin. The payment layer, first proposed by Joseph Poon and Tadge Dryja about a year ago, promises to support a virtually unlimited number of off-chain transactions among users, at nearly no cost – while leveraging the security offered by Bitcoin. At least three companies – Poon and Dryja's Lightning, Blockstream and Blockchain – are currently working on implementations of the technology. But few outside this small technological frontline fully grasp how the “future of....

Lightning Labs new service, Pool, provides a marketplace for Lightning Network businesses and users to lease payment channel liquidity.

The Lightning Network is a design improvement for Bitcoin that could allow users to make micropayments in a decentralized manner and help the entire network scale more efficiently over time. While this proposal has received a large amount of attention in the Bitcoin community, there is another, similar option currently in development by C. J. Plooy. Plooy recently gave a presentation on his alternative implementation, Amiko Pay, at Scaling Bitcoin Montreal. During his talk, Plooy noted:"If you look at the basic design of the Lightning Network -- a network of payment channels. This is....

The Lightning Network is the reason Bitcoin will be legal tender in El Salvador. The main chain couldn’t serve a whole country without a fast and reliable payment channel built on top of it. It’s as simple as that. However, is the Lightning Network invulnerable to attacks? Is its architecture as bulletproof as Bitcoin’s main […]