Blockstream Completes Its First Lightning Transaction on Bitcoin Testnet

Progress on the bitcoin lightning network continues to advance. Following a promising trial of its routing network last week by French startup Acinq, Montreal-based Blockstream has announced that it has sent the first end-to-end transaction over the Lightning Network, a highly-anticipated top layer for the bitcoin network designed to boost transaction capacity. What the team called "Lightning's first strike" saw its developers send a transaction across a test version of the network successfully to another party, a process that included invoicing that party for bitcoin and routing....

Blockstream successfully tests Lightning payment protocol on Bitcoin blockchain. The Bitcoin Lightning micropayments protocol has successfully passed the test. The protocol was tested recently by researchers from Blockstream, a company contributing towards the maintenance and development of Bitcoin Core protocol. People from across the world are increasingly using Bitcoin as a medium of value exchange and storage. This has led to a sharp rise in the number of transactions being processed by the Bitcoin blockchain on a daily basis. As the community continues to grow, the Bitcoin network....

Is the scaling effort leading to Bitcoin’s privatization? NodeCounter.com accuses Blockstream of crippling Bitcoin for financial gain. Since Blockstream got involved in the scaling of Bitcoin, the issue of Bitcoin privatization has sprung up. Blockstream President Adam Back is of the view that a plan for scaling Bitcoin to handle more users over the next few years would double the on-chain transaction capacity on the network three years in a row, while simultaneously allowing for the development of layer-2 solutions, such as the Lightning Network, which could allow for millions or billions....

Readers may remember our coverage of a Roger Ver interview from a few days ago where the veteran Bitcoiner and entrepreneur told Bitcoin Uncensored that Lightning Network was still untested and could take a long time to get off the ground. At the time, he was right. But this morning CCN can report that a successful test, using Bitcoin testnet coins, has been conducted by developers at Blockstream. In the test, the developers used an ASCII cat picture as a demo product. The developer below can be seen manipulating a combination of bitcoind and lightningd, the Bitcoin daemon and Lightning....

The end-to-end Lightning micropayment transaction test shows to the Bitcoin community that it is possible to perform payments on a public Blockchain, says Christian Decker, a developer with Montreal-based Blockstream on the significance of the exercise. Decker says: “The test has uncovered a number of bugs, that were quickly fixed, and has shown that it is indeed feasible to perform payments on a public Blockchain.” Blockstream had announced that it sent the first end-to-end transaction over the Lightning Network to another party through a process that included invoicing a party for....