Living in the Past is a bad idea.
Middle-aged dadbros bringing up high school football is cringeworthy “careers,” When our mothers blather on and on about the college they spent in Europe, (it is always Italy), we sigh.
Now it’s your turn.
Lighting Network was the best thing that has ever happened to Bitcoin — until it wasn’t.
Refresher: Lightning, a layer-2 proposal for super-fast (almost instantly) and inexpensive BTC transfers.
It usually takes an average of one hour for a bitcoin transfer to be confirmed. A transaction will only settle when six blocks have been added to the blockchain. This is standard procedure, with blocks arriving every 10 minutes.
Lightning Network is a system that allows two users (or more) to establish a channel of payments between themselves. Only the first transaction and last one in this channel are actually added to the Bitcoin blockchain.
Everything else in between then becomes just a matter for the two parties — so no need to wait for any confirmations at all, beyond the offchain tallies displayed by the Lightning app being used.
Lightning, the crypto-currency that has been a major player in recent years is only known to those who have experienced it after El Salvador adopts bitcoin as legal currency in September 2021.
Lightning was the backbone of many payment processors, including OpenNode and Chivo. Many Salvadorans became Lightning users without even realizing it.
Although the rollout went smoothly, there were some problems. While Lightning’s capacity was on the increase in the months leading up to El Salvador adopting the technology, bitcoin volumes bouncing through channels grew by almost 40% over the next three-month period, going from less than 2,400 BTC, to more than 3,300 BTC.
There are now closer to 5,000 BTC (500 million dollars with BTC valued at $100k). However, growth in the last two-and-ahalf years has been stagnant.
Lightning used to be so much funnier and more interesting when there were less than 1,000 BTC in the network. The days of silly micropayments.
In late 2018 and into early 2019, there was a proliferation experimental apps that captured the imagination. Satoshi’s Games and Miniclip’s gaming portals, along with a Mario-clone were among the many experimental apps that captured imaginations between late 2018 and early 2019. “Super Bro” This turned every coin in the game into a collectible.
Those were great. None of them could hold a torch (or even compare to the Lightning Torch), but two stood out:
- You could feed live chickens via livestream for a short time using Pollo.feed. The magic money of the internet was immediately physical.
- Satoshi’s World would let you traverse Google Earth, tagging it with whatever nonsense graffiti you’d like — and visible for all the other digital travelers to see (I tagged Amsterdam Central Station with “LONG BITCOIN, SHORT THE BANKERS”).
Bitcoin’s importance is increasing. It’s not.
Internet was better back when everyone did dumb things on Lightning Network. We’re unlikely to return.
Who’s up for hearing about the time that I scored a touchdown on full court?
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