In Satoshi’s Bitcoin Whitepaper, he envisioned Bitcoin to be a peer to peer payment network. In the decade since, Bitcoin has been anything but that. A speculative asset? Check. A bubble that burst in 2018? Check. A store of value? Check. Digital gold? Check. Thus far, Bitcoin has had scaling issues in terms of handling transaction volumes. Coupled with price volatility, it has kept the asset from becoming a peer to peer currency, but more of a asset for speculation and investment, which might be better in the short to mid term anyway. But I recently had an experience with Lightning Network that could change things. I used the Bitcoin Lightning Network for the first time ever.
What is Lightning Network?
Lightning Network is a 2nd layer protocol that is built on top of the Bitcoin Blockchain. It is designed to help scale bitcoin payments and solve for the high fees and low transaction volumes.
I can’t explain how it works better than Binance’s video explainer on YouTube, so here it is.
My experience with Lightning Network
I was happily browsing my twitter feed, when I came across this tweet by Danny Scott, CEO of CoinCorner, based in the UK.
I had heard of the Lightning Network prior to this of course, but wasn’t actively following the progress and development status. It has apparently been live for over a year, but it seems like not too many people are using it still.
In fact, as of May this year, Ethereum’s wrapped BTC (wBTC) has twice the amount of bitcoin locked on their network than on the Lightning Network. Regardless, it is still an interesting proposition, plus the fact that it’s built on top of the Bitcoin Blockchain makes it more interesting in the long run to me, as it preserves and sits on the actual blockchain it is supposed to transact for.
I was a little bit wary of the tweet, in light of the recent twitter hack involving bitcoin. But I took a longer look at the tweet, and the Wallet of Satoshi app, which was a legit app on the Google Play.
So I took him up on the offer.
Wallet of Satoshi, the world’s simplest Lightning Network wallet
I went to Google Play and downloaded the wallet of satoshi app. The process was as simple as Danny’s tweet. There was no signup required, no configurations to be done. All I had to do was literally those steps:
- Download the wallet
- Click receive Lightning
- Paste the address or QR code
The one thing to note though, is that Wallet of Satoshi is a custodial wallet. This means that the private keys are held by a 3rd party, in this case, WOS. But, we’re talking about Lightning Network here. The use case here is micropayments. Think of it as your starbucks card. You wouldn’t credit a thousand dollars in there. Just a few dollars, enough to get your coffee and bagel.
Did I get free money?
So, here comes the moment of truth. Was it a scam? Did Danny deliver? Is Lightning Network legit?
As they say, the proof is in the screengrab!
OKAY! Peer to peer money transfer. Check!
The other proposition about Lightning Network was low fees, so I asked Danny how much it cost him to send me the 1,000 sats, and he said 1 sat.
Last I checked, 10 satoshi was equivalent to USD$0.001, so 1 satoshi… I don’t even think there’s a USD equivalent for that! I think there’s still a long way to get people to actively use it and actually pay for things. Afterall, 1,000 sats could one day be valued at $10 or more! With BTC price discovery still very much in its infancy, I will hang on to all my sats while belting up for the ride.
So, thank you Danny! But if anyone wants to experiment and play “I’ll send you mine if you send me yours”, feel free to download the wallet and hit me up on Twitter!
Oh, if you liked this article, and want to tip me some sats, you know what to do!
If you don’t care for sats, and want to stack some serious bitcoin, then you can consider using services like coinbase and crypto.com to purchase bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
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