My first adventures with Lightning Network! ⚡⚡

Bitcoin

The one, the only, the original. The grand daddy of coins, the unkillable honey badger. The Apex preditor of money. The crypto of Dragons. We all know it.

(image generated with Midjourney, used with permission)

Bitcoin will never die.

Old fashioned?

"But Bitcoin is old and slow!" you say "It's crusty and old fashioned, and my Derpcoin gets 20 billion transactions per second!"

Nope! Bitcoin was smart, and kept layer one slow, so that nodes could be light weight and the coin could stay decentralized. I'll admit it took me a while to wrap my brain around this.

Instead, a layer 2 was created, called The Lightning Network!

The Lightning Network! ⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡

The Lightning Network is a second layer protocol that runs on top of Bitcoin that allows for fast and cheap transactions. The transactions can be instant or nearly so, and transaction fees are very tiny, fractions of a penny.

In Lightning Network, you create a "channel" which is a transaction on the main bitcoin network. In this channel, you can transact as much as you like, at some point, the channel could be closed, which is a transaction on the main network that will settle funds and move them to the correct addresses.

Finally tried it out

This Lightning Network has been around for a couple years now, but it's been in beta and still being worked on, and it's been hard to use, improving, but hard to use. I finally found something easy and tried it out.

How I did it

I used Alby, which is a web browser plugin that makes it pretty easy.
https://getalby.com/ Get it here. With Alby, you have a choice to link it up to a variety of lightning wallets, the easiest is just to pick the default Alby wallet.

Careful, the default Alby Wallet is custodial

I will note that the easy option is also custodial, meaning that Alby is holding your coins for you, so keep that in mind and only keep a small amount of coin in it. The non-custodial options look like they require a bit more work, I will investigate them, and hopefully describe one in a future post.

(The logo of Alby)

Alby is fully open source:
https://github.com/getAlby/lightning-browser-extension

How to fund your wallet

Once you have your lightning wallet set up, you need a little bit of coin in it. How to do that? Of course there are a lot of ways, but there is a very easy way for a person in Hive to do it.

V4Vapp

There is something called the V4Vapp in Hive that let's you trade between Hive/HBD and Bitcoin lightning sats.
https://lnd.v4v.app/

I've used it a couple times, and it's pretty cool. Written by @brianoflondon. Please vote on his hive proposal for development of this app.
https://peakd.com/me/proposals/244

Fun with Lightning

Once you have this funded app going, you can play around with Lightning. You can tip people, convert money between Hive and Bitcoin quickly. Try out some apps, like Nostr, Stacker.News, Lightning Poker...