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We all know that it is absurd to live in the past.
It's awkward when middle-aged parents talk about their high school football "careers," and we shake our heads when our mothers talk about their college semesters abroad in Europe (it's always Italy).
But now it's my turn.
The Lighting Network was the best thing that ever happened to Bitcoin – until it disappeared.
Disclaimer: Lightning is a proposed layer 2 solution to enable ultra-fast (near-instantaneous) and cheap BTC transfers.
Typically, it takes about an hour on average for Bitcoin transfers to be fully confirmed. Standard practice is that a transaction is only settled when it is six blocks into the chain, and blocks arrive every 10 minutes or so.
Instead, the accelerator network allows two users to open a payment channel between them, and only the first and last transaction in that channel actually makes it to the Bitcoin blockchain.
Everything else in between becomes just a matter of mutual interest – so there's no need to wait for any confirmations at all, other than the Offchain statistics displayed by the Lightning app being used.
Anyone who has entered the world of cryptocurrencies in the past three years may only really know about Lightning until El Salvador's massive adoption of Bitcoin as legal tender in September 2021.
It used the official government app Chivo and other payment processors like OpenNode Lightning as its backbone. This means that many ordinary Salvadorans have suddenly become Lightning users, even if they don't quite know it.
the Subtract It was not without problems. And while lightning capacity Despite rising in the run-up to El Salvador's adoption, the amount of bitcoins bouncing around the channels still jumped nearly 40% in the following three months, from less than 2,400 bitcoins to 3,300 bitcoins.
These days, there are roughly 5,000 bitcoins ($500 million with BTC at $100,000), but growth has been stagnant in the past two and a half years.
The real kicker is that Lightning was much more fun and important when there were less than 1,000 Bitcoins on the network. When silly micropayment scams became free.
Between late 2018 and early 2019, A Spread Of experimental applications captured the imagination. There were Miniclip-style game portals such as Satoshi's Games, as well as a "Super Bro" Mario version that turned every in-game coin into a collectible currency.
Those were great. But no one holds a candle (or even... Lightning flame) for two in particular:
- pollo.feed, which Allowed You can feed actual live chickens remotely for just a few days while watching via live stream. The magical Internet money became material instantly.
- Satoshi's World will allow you to traverse Google Earth, tag it with whatever nonsense graffiti you want — and be visible for all other digital travelers to see (me Tagged Amsterdam Central Station with "LONG BITCOIN, SHORT THE BANKERS").
It's okay for Bitcoin to be more serious these days. But it is not.
The Internet was a lot better when we were all doing stupid things on the Lightning Network. Sadly, we will probably never return.
Now, who's ready to hear about that time you landed the full field?
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