The lightning network is a second layer ontop of the Bitcoin protocol which is gaining a lot of momentum currently.
A second layer means that it is aimed to handle Bitcoin transactions at low fees and scalable, even enabling smart contracts. But not every transaction done in the Lightning Network has to be written to the Bitcoin blockchain itself. The current implementation is in beta stage and should not be used with a lot of funds as user or power user.
The network has a couple of interesting things to it and how you can use Bitcoin, learn details in the ressources below.
In short, nodes can create Bitcoin channels via multisignature transactions and other people can use these channels to get their Bitcoin forwarded. Once there is a bigger network, there will be competing channels in price or location. The bigger the network, the less hops (and probably fees) can be archieved.
Will the network persist? Nobody can say that yet. Will it be the only second layer solution? Maybe other solutions will come up. Maybe one day we will see a third layer for Bitcoin, something that wraps around lightning in order to facilitate Bitcoin transactions even easier or if you want more complex features. Let us see where this evolves.
It certainly is interesting and entertaining to play around with this new technology.
⚡️ Here are the ressources that I have mainly used. ⚡️
First of all, the specification
https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lightning-rfc
Second, the implementation in Go
https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd
Setup a node on Ubuntu 16.04
https://gist.github.com/bretton/0b22a0503a9eba09df86a23f3d625c13
Lightning Explorer
Setup a Lightning Cluser
https://dev.lightning.community/tutorial/01-lncli/
Last but not Least the Lightning wiki
https://lightningwiki.net/index.php/Main_Page
If you are using any of those ressources, leave a comment. If you like this, leave a share for others to see more about the Lightning network. Happy Lightning! ⚡️