For now, choosing the Lightning Network seems to be the right path. After the Lightning Network launched the Bitmain network, it has indeed achieved very low-cost instant payment, which is being adopted by more and more merchants.
This article is divided into four parts to introduce the past, present, future and detailed principles of Lightning Network in detail.
First, the lightning torch movement; Second, the current status of the lightning network; Third, the development history of the lightning network; Fourth, the detailed explanation of the lightning network principle.
I. Lightning Torch Movement
A lightning network reward relay is in full swing among Twitter users. This viral campaign is now known as the Lightning Torch Campaign. Just like the Ice Bucket Challenge campaign on social media in 2016, this caused a lot of spread and attention on the Lightning Network.
On January 20, 2019, twitter user @ hodlnaut tweeted that he sent 100,000 Satoshi (100k satoshis, 1 BTC equals 100 million Satoshi) to the first selected user through the lightning network rewards application tippin.me, An additional 10,000 users will be issued to the next user. And so on, until the last user is unwilling to add another 10,000 Satoshi and take the bitcoin accumulated by the previous owner as his own, the game is over.
Hodlnaut wanted to see how many Satoshi the reward relay game would end.
Enthusiastic netizens have specially created a website to track in real time which Twitter user the lightning torch has reached. According to the website information, as of press time, there have been 215 users participating in the delivery, and recently one person needs to send 3.15 million Satoshi Bitcoins. The cumulative total of Bitcoin sent has reached 4.56 BTC.
If no one actively terminates the game, the torch transfer will automatically end when more than 0.168 bitcoins are passed. Because the current maximum capacity of the Lightning Network payment channel is set at about 0.168 Bitcoin. Developers are currently developing to increase the capacity of payment channels.
Many celebrities in the digital currency industry have participated in the delivery of the lightning torch, including Andreas Antonopoulos, author of Mastering Bitcoin, Anthony Pompliano, founder of Morgan Creek, Roger Ver, Bitcoin Jesus, Joost Jager, Lightning Lab engineer, and Zhao Changpeng, founder of Binance , Tron founder Sun Yuchen, Twitter founder and square CEO Jack, BitMEX Research.
Hodlnaut, the initiator of the Lightning Torch, has ordered a Tesla to promote Musk's participation in this event.
Tippin.me developer Sergio Abril said that the Google Chrome extension for Tippin.me has been released on February 17. After installing the extension, a Lightning Network reward button will be displayed under each tweet, which can directly reward twitter users. But you need to open Tippin.me first, otherwise it will show that this user does not exist.
https://preview.redd.it/m53j4avyahe41.png?width=601&format=png&auto=webp&s=3d2bfdbdd6cb67aade85a601e4b47fb120428331
The picture below is a screenshot of someone giving a tweet to the golden financial reporter on February 20th.
https://preview.redd.it/vzy20164bhe41.jpg?width=585&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b04a5ff2926a67c279b90d675b6c6b363d52e723
At present, the lightning torch is only available among twitter users, and you can log in to tippin.me with a twitter account and create lightning network invoice information (invoice). Twitter and tippin.me are closely related because Twitter CEO is one of Tippin's investors.
Status of Lightning Network
Lightning Network has grown rapidly since October 2018.
According to the 1ml data of Lightning Web Browser, as of press time, Lightning Network has 6,473 nodes, a total of 28,783 payment channels, and a total network channel capacity of 708.34 Bitcoins. Both the payment channel and the total network capacity have increased by nearly 30% within 30 days.
https://preview.redd.it/8nklfkuebhe41.png?width=600&format=png&auto=webp&s=86eb576b96b21ed6b4ea279da484d07dd4386b0f
It is worth noting that another layer of the 1ml name means that the goal of Lightning Network is to reach 1 million Lightning Network nodes, which currently only achieves 0.6% of the goal.
https://preview.redd.it/k9muqm5hbhe41.png?width=600&format=png&auto=webp&s=fd99e714d0230f859af26b8c5f4097426f2594cd
According to p2sh.info statistics, the capacity of Lightning Network Channel is more than 8 times of half a year ago, and 157 times of a year ago. Golden Finance estimates that at the current growth rate of 30% per month, the lightning network capacity can reach 10,000 BTC in 10 months, and the lightning network capacity can reach 100,000 BTC in 19 months.
On February 11, Twitter, Square CEO Jack Dorsey, and Lightning Labs CEO Elizabeth Stark participated in the Stephan Livera podcast. Jack announced that the Lightning Network was not a question of integration into the Square Cash App, but a question of when to integrate.
Because of the low-cost (or even no-service) small-amount instant payment feature, Lightning Network Payment has been integrated into various applications such as sports event prediction, betting, knowledge payment, rewards, and payment on behalf of others. These integrated apps are called Lapps.
https://preview.redd.it/0nhwr1wubhe41.png?width=466&format=png&auto=webp&s=1194a5bad1eb44fd45589e7152d895218439b503
Y'alls is a paid reading website that uses the Lightning Network to pay, and paying a small amount of bitcoin can read the articles inside the website's pay wall.
Zigzag is an exchange that can exchange other cryptocurrencies to Lightning Network Bitcoins at a low cost and high speed, or exchange Lightning Network Bitcoins to other cryptocurrencies.
Australian cryptocurrency payment gateway livingroomofsatoshi provides various services such as payment of credit cards, bank bills, and rent with the Lightning Network.
Satoshi's place, similar to EOS Pixel Master, people can spend a bit of smart Bitcoin to occupy pixels in the picture. The gold financial reporter spent 1890 Satoshi writing the word "golden" in the lower right corner of the canvas (red circled in the figure below).
https://preview.redd.it/2h5k3oy5che41.png?width=600&format=png&auto=webp&s=9eba8abb1c9cc33d2f5a392787631bb06e1f6b03
Competition is fierce, as of press time, pixels have been covered by other users
Event prediction and sports betting website microbet.fun currently provides event prediction and betting functions for four sports: football, rugby, basketball and ice hockey. NBA, Premier League, Bundesliga, La Liga, Serie A and other famous sports leagues are predicting the bet list.
Golden Financial reporters tried several Lapps and found that Lightning Network truly achieved at least two of its stated goals: extremely low fees and instant payment. In terms of fees, several payments initiated by Golden Financial reporters have no fees, and the amount can be as low as 1 Satoshi. In terms of payment speed, it is indeed within seconds. The payment experience is not lost to Visa.
There are currently several Lightning Network clients, the three most popular of which are Lightning Labs' Ind (Lightning Network Daemon, Go implementation), ACINQ's eclair (Scala implementation), and Blockstream's c-lightning (C implementation).
Lightning Network gives users / merchants a great deal of freedom. Any user / merchant can set up their own Lightning Network node by themselves, and can directly use third-party node services such as lightninginabox and Casa Node to own the node out of the box, as well as open source third-party payment services, such as the open source project lndhub, BTCPayServer sets up nodes and develops wallets for users to use your nodes, and everyone can open a bank freely. In terms of wallets, similar to Ethereum's Metamask wallet, Lightning Network also has Google's extended wallet Lightning Joule, as well as light wallets provided by third parties and ToB payment service providers such as OpenNode and Lightning Network POS system NanoPos.
How does Lightning Network achieve the fast payment experience? Bitcoin analyst JP Thor research pointed out that because the layer-2 lightning network payment does not need to go through a third-party intermediary, the payment between two points can be as fast as the TCP / IP connection, so the lightning network payment speed will exceed Visa. At present, the processing speed of a channel of Lightning Network can exceed 250TPS, and there is no upper limit for network expansion. Visa's current payment peak is 50,000 tps, with an average value of about 24,000 tps. Bitcoin's processing speed is only 7 tps.
In this way, real-time payment is truly realized, and the vision of the Bitcoin white paper cash payment function becomes a reality.
Third, the development of Lightning Network
The prototype of the Lightning Network can be traced back to the first version of Bitcoin software Bitcoin 0.1 released by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009. Bitcoin 0.1 includes a draft of the original code, allowing users to update transactions before they are broadcast on the blockchain to confirm transactions. This may be the prototype of the payment channel concept. Satoshi Nakamoto explained in detail to how the payment channel will work in a personal communication with the then Bitcoinj developer Mike Hearn.
In 2014, Alex Akselrod proposed a two-way payment channel, and he is now an engineer at Lightning Labs.
Prior to the publication of the 2015 Lightning Network White Paper, in order to address the Bitcoin scalability vulnerability, PeterTodd designed and implemented a new type of time lock timelock, CheckLockTimeVerify (CLTV) in the Bitcoin protocol.
In February 2015, Thaddeus Dryja and Joseph Poon published a Lightning Network white paper-Bitcoin Lightning Network: Scalable off-chain instant payment. That same month, they elaborated on their ideas in public for the first time at a Bitcoin developer seminar in San Francisco.
For almost a whole year in 2015, the Bitcoin community focused on issues such as Bitcoin expansion and block size issues. Two expansion conferences: Scaling Bitcoin Montreal in September, and Scaling Bitcoin Hongkong in December.
Soon after the Hong Kong Expansion Conference, Bitcoin core developer Gregory Maxwell proposed a Bitcoin expansion roadmap in the Bitcoin-development mailing list. This roadmap includes the Lightning Network. This roadmap has the support of most Bitcoin technology communities and became the Bitcoin Core roadmap.
In May 2015, the blockchain development company Blockstream hired Russell, the core Linux developer, and hoped that he would implement the Lightning Network in C: C-Lightning.
In January 2016, two authors of Lightning Network, Poon and Dryja, and Elizabeth Stark and Olaoluwa “Laolu” Osuntokun co-founded a new company LightningLabs to develop the Lightning Network. LightningLabs will develop lnd in Go language.
In October 2016, the third Bitcoin expansion conference was held in Milan. A few days after the meeting, the main developers of Lightning Networks such as ACINQ, Amiko Pay, BitFury, Blockstream, Lightning Labs and Purse held their first LightningSummit. This conference discussed how to make all different Lightning Networks compatible and interoperable with each other, and form the Lightning Network Protocol Specification BOLT (Basis of Lightning Technology). BOLT became the basic specification of Lightning Network.
The idea of the Lightning Network white paper is incompatible with the Bitcoin protocol and requires some protocol upgrades to Bitcoin. CLTV time lock requires that the payment channel be closed regularly, and the use of relative time lock Lightning Network will perform better. In the summer of 2016, the Bitcoin network implemented a soft fork upgrade called CheckSequenceVerify (CSV).
Before Segregated Witness is activated, Lightning Network based on Segregated Witness is continuously tested. In May 2016, the fourth version of Blockstream segregated witnessed the "SegNet 4" Lightning Network c-lightning test online. In October of that year, Christian Decker of Blockstream purchased a photo of a cat from his colleague Rusty Russell on the testnet, which is considered to be the first breakthrough of the Lightning Network.
https://preview.redd.it/cvhqqaaoche41.png?width=884&format=png&auto=webp&s=3dca1a97d94ce82dd8735b927c2190745fd734c5
In January 2017, lnd released an alpha version. More and more developers are starting to develop various applications based on Lightning Network, including desktop, mobile wallets, small knowledge payment platforms, gaming, browsers, and other Lapp applications.
In August 2017, Segregated Witness was activated, and obstacles to the deployment of Lightning Network on the Bitcoin mainnet were cleared.
In November 2017, Blockstream first announced that the beta version of the c-lightning Lightning Network was launched on the Bitcoin mainnet and completed the first transaction. Then, Lightning Labs announced that Lightning Network completed the first cross-chain transaction between Bitcoin and Litecoin.
In December 2017, Blockstream, Lightning Labs, and ACINQ announced that the three implementations of Lightning Network are compatible with interoperability.
Although the Lightning Network on the Bitcoin mainnet is still in beta, users can't wait to trade with real Bitcoin.
In December 2017, Lightning Network ushered in its first transaction. Lightning network developer Alex Bosworth and payer Bitrefill established a payment channel and paid their phone bills with Bitcoin.
In January 2018, Lazlo Hanyecz, a legend in Bitcoin history, announced that he had successfully purchased pizza again through the Lightning Network. Lazlo Hanyecz was famous for buying pizza with 10,000 Bitcoins.
In March 2018, Lightning Lab released the ind beta version and received a $ 2.5 million seed round investment including the twitter CEO.
Since then, nodes, wallets, payments, and applications have been continuously developed, and merchants and services connected to the Lightning Network have continued to increase, and the Lightning Network has begun to explode.
Interpretation of the working principle of Lightning Network
This part is a hard core understanding of Lightning Network, mainly from the Lightning Network White Paper by Thaddeus Dryja and Joseph Poon.
To understand the Lightning Network, you need to understand several concepts: 1. Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO); 2. Multi-signature; 3. Two-way payment channels; 4. RSMC — Revocable sequential expiry contracts Revocable Sequence Maturity Contract, 5) HTLC-Hashed Timelock Contract.
1.Unspent transaction output UTXO
The Bitcoin model is not a common account model, but uses unspent transaction output UTXO. Except for mining rewards, there are no inputs and only outputs, and all other Bitcoin transactions have corresponding inputs and outputs.
UTXO specifies the number of Bitcoins that can be spent and the owner. You can only spend Bitcoins at this address if you prove that you are the owner. Prove that you are the owner by unlocking a "ScriptPubKey" which is stored in a field in "Output". When UTXO is spent and used as the "input" of a transaction, a "ScriptSig" needs to be provided, and the "Unlock Script" and "Lock Script" are combined to run. The verification is successful. Allowed and generate new "output".
We use the famous digital currency Alice, Bob, Carol transfer to illustrate.
Assuming Alice transfers 0.5 BTC to Bob, the "output" of this transfer transaction will be set as the following "lock script":
OP_DUP OP_HASH160 <Bob public key hash value> OP_EQUALVERIFY OP_CHECKSIG
The effect of this lock script is that if you can't prove that you are Bob, you can't spend 0.5 BTC.
When Bob wants to transfer the money from Alice to Carol, Bitcoin will first find the UTXO from Alice, then create a new transaction and generate the "output" of this new transaction. This output also contains "Lockdown Script" for Carol. At the same time, an "unlock script" is generated in the input of this transaction, and it is arranged by <Bob digital signature> <Bob public key>. Then broadcast the transaction into the memory pool and wait for the miner to verify that Bob's transaction is legal and not spent.
The specific method for the miner to verify is to take out the "unlock script" in the "input" of this transaction and run it together with the "lock script" in UTXO that Alice transferred to Bob. The specific form is as follows:
<Bob signature> <Bob public key> OP_DUP OP_HASH160 <Bob public key hash value> OP_EQUALVERIFY OP_CHECKSIG
The verification steps are as follows: 1. Take out the <Bob signature> and push it onto the stack; 2. Take out the <Bob public key> and push it onto the stack, and now the <Bob public key> is on the top of the stack; 3. OP_DUP copies the < Bob public key>; 4, HASH160 instruction to hash the <Bob public key> and push it into the stack, and now at the top of the stack is the hash value of Bob public key; 4. Take out the <Bob public key hash value> And push it into the stack, where the <Bob public key hash value> comes from the output of the previous transaction; 5. EQUALVERIFY instruction: take out the two public key hashes at the top of the stack and continue if they are equal, otherwise the verification fails 6. CHECKSIG instruction: Take out <Bob public key> and <Bob signature> for signature verification. If it is true, the transaction is legal.
In the above example, a private key unlocks the corresponding UTXO, also called a pay-to-pubkey hash (P2PKH, Pay To PubKey Hash). For asset security and transaction expansion, Bitcoin also has multi-signature technology. Multi-signature requires multiple private keys to unlock the corresponding UTXO.
2.Multi-signature technology
The technology that uses multiple private keys to unlock the corresponding UTXO is called multi-signature technology. The general form of multi-signature is M-of-N multi-signature. There are N public keys (2 <N≤15) in the "lock script". A digital signature generated by at least M private keys is required to unlock UTXO.
Multi-signature technology only relies on the OP_CHECKMULTISIG instruction to verify the legitimacy of the transaction. This instruction reads the M signatures and N public keys and the M and N values, and then uses the public keys to verify the signatures in sequence, and the successful matching counter is incremented by one. Finally, the counter is equal to M and the operation is successful.
The following uses 2-of-3 multi-signature as an example.
Lock script in the 2-of-3 case:
2 <Public Key 1> <Public Key 2> <Public Key 3> 3 OP_CHECKMULTISIG
Assuming that only private key 1 and private key 3 are used, the unlock script is:
0 <signature 1> <signature 3>
The composite instruction is:
0 <signature 1> <signature 3> 2 <public key 1> <public key 2> <public key 3> 3 OP_CHECKMULTISIG
Run successfully.
However, the multi-signature lock script uses all public keys, and the amount of data is too large, which will increase transaction costs. So now multi-signature uses a payment to Script Hash P2SH (Pay to Script Hash) transaction, introduces a Redeem Script concept, and moves N public key information from the lock script to the unlock script.
The locking script in the new scheme has become concise:
OP_HASH160 <hash of redemption script> OP_EQUAL
The hash of the redemption script here is only 160 bits, or 20 bytes, which is much shorter than the previous N public keys.
Original text of "Redemption Script":
2 <Public Key 1> <Public Key 2> <Public Key 3> 3 OP_CHECKMULTISIG
The unlock script is:
0 <signature 1> <signature 2> <redemption script>
Synthetic instructions:
0 <signature 1> <signature 2> <redemption script> OP_HASH160 <hash of redemption script> OP_EQUAL
Based on the characteristics of the stack, this instruction first performs a hash operation on <Redemption Script>, and then compares with <Hash of Redemption Script>. If the original script is run like this:
0 <signature 1> <signature 3> 2 <public key 1> <public key 2> <public key 3> 3 OP_CHECKMULTISIG
3.Two-way payment channel
With the understanding of multi-signature technology, the first step of Lightning Network is easy to understand. The Lightning Network interacts with the Bitcoin network through a payment channel. Users first establish a two-way payment channel, and the core transfers the user's Bitcoin to a multi-signature address. This is called Funding Tx in the Lightning Network white paper.
We also take Alice and Bob as examples. If Alice buys breakfast or coffee from Bob every day, they only need to pre-store a part of their money in a third-party common account. After each transaction, the two parties agree to update their account allocation. The transactions between them are paid on Lightning Network. The peer-to-peer expansion in the channel (also known as the Commitment Transaction Commitment Tx), the whole network broadcast is not on the chain, and the peer-to-peer instant payment is truly achieved. Only after one party decides to stop using the other party's service and close the payment channel, the final channel status is broadcast on the Bitcoin network, and Alice and Bob unanimously sign the agreement and settle the chain. In theory, as long as the number of Bitcoins recharged when the payment channel is opened is sufficient, the number of transactions in the channel can be unlimited.
The essence of the payment channel is that Alice and Bob transfer their bitcoins into a 2-of-2 multi-signature address.
But how to prevent Alice or Bob from cheating when closing the payment channel and not broadcasting the final status on the Bitcoin network? Lightning Network uses RSMC to ensure that both parties are honest and not cheating. If the payment channel is closed, the latest channel status is broadcast to the Bitcoin network.
4. RSMC-Revocable Sequence Maturity Contract
The Lightning Network white paper page 19 describes how RSMC works:
If the user does not broadcast the latest channel status, it will be punished, and the other party will take all the funds in the channel. Because the funds of both parties are kept in RSMC, he has to wait for 1,000 blocks to confirm (Note: Timelock) before he can get the funds, while the other party has two signatures and he gets all the funds in the channel before him. If the user broadcasts the latest channel status, there will be no revocable transactions. After a period of time (1000 block confirmations), both parties to the transaction will get their own funds.
We also choose Alice and Bob to deposit 0.5 bitcoin each to a multi-signature address to open a payment channel as an example to illustrate how RSMC actually ensures that people pay honestly.
https://preview.redd.it/88b73zawche41.png?width=1065&format=png&auto=webp&s=82f8c8396e6d84f61be2f2fc519081689b1eaec4
In the picture above, Alice and Bob are mirror-symmetric. It is enough to study one person clearly. Alice and Bob will create a Commitment Transaction (Commitment Tx) C1a and C1b, respectively.
Commitment transaction (Commitment Tx) C1a has two outputs, one is 0.5BTC in the RSMC address signed by Alice and Bob, and the other is 0.5BTC of Bob (output 1 in the figure).
Below C1a, there will be a Revocable Delivery Transaction (RD1a) and a Delivery Transcation (D1a). RD1a uses BTC in RSMC. Because RSMC is a multi-signature address, both Alice and Bob's signatures are required. The RD1a output is paid to Alice 0.5BTC, but only if the C1a transaction is broadcast and confirmed by 1000 blocks. D1a indicates that Bob can consume this 0.5BTC at will. As long as C1a is broadcast, Bob can immediately broadcast D1a to get 0.5BTC.
The essence of the final result of the whole mechanism is that if Alice wants to terminate the transaction with Bob, he can choose to broadcast C1a, Bob can get 0.5 BTC immediately, and Alice needs to confirm to get 0.5 BTC after 1000 blocks. The same is true for Bob.
Consider again the transaction between Alice and Bob. For example, Alice spends 0.1 BTC to buy a cup of coffee from Bob. Now the allocation of funds in the payment channel needs to be changed to Alice (0.4 BTC) and Bob (0.6 BTC). This requires two steps. One is to create a new committed transaction, and the other is to invalidate the previous transaction.
Create new committed transaction
Below is the left side of C1a and C1b (the RMC and subsequent transactions are omitted for the sake of illustration); the middle column is the new transaction created by Alice: C2a, RD2a, D2a; the rightmost column is the new transaction created by Bob: C2b, RD2b, D2b.
https://preview.redd.it/57kmkconehe41.jpg?width=600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=605f98837ad7e8373eca58deb0d8aeb68d68d03a
C2a and C1a have the same structure. From Alice's point of view, the number of BTC in the RSMC address that Alice and Bob sign together is 0.4 BTC, and Bob's is 0.6 BTC.
Bob will also create the corresponding C2b, RD2b and D2b, and then the two parties will exchange the promised transaction and the RSMC transaction to complete the signature, and the new transaction will take effect.
Obsolete old commitment transactions
At this time, the old and new transactions (C1a / C2a, C1b / C2b) exist simultaneously and are valid at the same time. How to abolish the old promise transaction?
Lightning Network abolishes the old committed transactions C1a and C1b through two methods: one is to exchange private keys between the two parties; the other is to create a "Breach Remedy Transaction (BR1a / BR1b)" instead of the RSMC revocable transaction (RD1a / RD1b).
https://preview.redd.it/nei5s55rehe41.png?width=993&format=png&auto=webp&s=5e7fea2246e55eae159fa22c2d8ece22789f3d5c
As shown in the figure above, the input of the new Breach Remedy Transaction (BR1a) is 0.5BTC in the multi-signature RSMC, and the output is 0.5BTC paid to Bob.
Therefore, if Alice signs and broadcasts the old channel state C1a in violation, the funds in the Funding Tx multi-signature will be transferred to the multi-signature RSMC and Bob addresses, each 0.5 BTC. At the same time, in addition to owning the private key of 0.5BTC in RSMC, Bob also received Alice's private key, so Bob can broadcast BR1a to the entire network. The RD1a created by Alice needs to wait for another 1,000 block confirmations to take effect. In this way, Bob has all the funds in the payment channel.
The multi-signature RSMC firstly delays the acquisition of funds by the person who closed the payment channel, and secondly, it can provide economic incentives to invalidate the old transaction without cheating, because broadcasting the channel status of the old transaction will have penalties, and the Bitcoin in the payment channel will be fully Be owned by the other party.
Through this mechanism, it is ensured that Alice will not broadcast C1a, and C1a will naturally become invalid.
Subsequent new commitment transactions D, E, F in the payment channel are also processed according to the above process, ensuring that Alice and Bob always broadcast according to the latest channel status when they want to close the payment channel.
The above discussion is the payment process of Alice and Bob, which cannot be turned into a lightning network . If there is no direct payment channel between two nodes, they can be indirectly connected through other nodes to form a lightning network. The payment between them is called Multihop payments.
The Lightning Network can make multi-hop payment between nodes through HTLC-Hashed Timelock Contract.
5. HTLC-Hashed Timelock Contract
https://preview.redd.it/le30h85xehe41.png?width=600&format=png&auto=webp&s=12e442c977cc933143258fe6e641cff6a2fb4853
What if Alice wants to pay Dave 0.1 BTC, but there is no direct payment channel between them? Dave will generate a random number R as a secret, and then send the hash value of R to Alice. Alice will tell Bob: If you tell me the preimage of H within three days, I will pay you 0.1 BTC. Bob tells Carol in the same way: If you tell me H's preimage within two days, I will pay you 0.1 BTC. Carol can tell Dave the same thing, but time is within a day. And Dave does know R.
Remember the case where someone gave a reward to a golden reporter via tippin.me? At the beginning of preparing this article, the golden financial reporter experienced Lightning Network Payment with Lightning Network Wallet, and transferred 1000 Satoshi to his tippin.me. In fact, there are multi-hop payments in this process. The golden financial reporter's wallet was jumped to tippin.me through Indhub.
The above is the overall picture of multi-hop payment. Let's take a look at the specific transaction between Alice and Bob. In multi-hop payment, although Alice and Bob use the established payment channel between them, the transaction between them is not the same as direct transaction, and HTLC-Hashed Timelock Contract is introduced.
Through the detailed explanation of Lightning Network above, the essence of Lightning Network is to link the nodes into a network through a payment channel, and then use the mechanism design and technical methods of RSMC, HTLC and other methods to avoid the moral hazard of the counterparty in the payment channel, so as to avoid the need to trust the other party and For third-party point-to-point payment, because there is no need to go online, the bottleneck of payment speed lies in the speed limit of the network, so it can be paid instantly.
According to the characteristics of the Lightning Network, such as payment channels and multi-hop payments, although the Lightning Network now basically achieves the user experience of instant payment at very low fees, there are also some problems, such as the centralization of payment channels, liquidity, and payment collection. People online, routing, etc.
Conclusion
Looking back at the development of Bitcoin and Lightning Network, maybe Bitcoin as a value storage currency and payment currency do not conflict at the same time. Bitcoin acts as a clearing network and Lightning Network acts as a payment network.
The widespread use of payment functions will increase the transaction volume of the Bitcoin clearing network, increase the transaction fee of the Bitcoin network, and increase the security and decentralization of the Bitcoin network. Positive feedback makes each other.
The only problem left is the problem of large price fluctuations. Lightning Network payment is based on Satoshi. If the price of Bitcoin is high enough, its volatility may be low enough to become a daily payment tool.
Bitcoin investor Tim Draper recently stated that the world will use Bitcoin to buy coffee in two years, and by 2023 baristas will laugh at those who are trying to buy coffee in fiat currencies.
Maybe one day this will come true.
References:
The History of Lightning: From Brainstorm to Beta
The Bitcoin Lightning Network: Scalable Off-Chain Instant Payments
An analysis of on-chain Lightning Network transactions in the Bitcoin blockchain
Understanding the Lightning Network (3 parts)
SUPPORT BTC ADDRESS: 1zjZCWiNZjW4NQJAzabp43txvEQX89PZC
