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A Portuguese software engineer has created âPoketoshi,â a platform that allows users to play Nintendoâs popular PokĂ©mon game on Bitcoinâs Lightning Network.
Portuguese software engineer JoĂŁo Almeida has created âPoketoshi,â a platform that allows users to play Nintendoâs popular PokĂ©mon game on the Lightning Network (LN), The Next Web reports today, June 19.
â JoĂŁo Almeida (@joaodealmeida94) June 19, 2018
Lightning Network is a second-layer solution to Bitcoinâs scalability limitations, opening payment channels between users that keep the majority of transactions off-chain, turning to the underlying blockchain only to record the net results.
Almeidaâs Poketoshi uses LN together with the live streaming video platform Twitch, which allows users to interact with the game via an online chat room - as in the existing âTwitch Plays PokĂ©monâ series.
Poketoshi implements a Lightning Network-enabled virtual controller for users to enter their gaming commands, charging them 10 Satoshi per command, one Satoshi being equal to a one hundred millionth of a single bitcoin.
Payments are made through OpenNode, a Lightning-enabled Bitcoin (BTC) payment processor. The game is therefore a playful way of testing the Lightning protocolâs ambition to facilitate off-chain instant BTC payments at high volume.
As The Next Web notes, several Poketoshi users are already making wry allusions to the notorious rivalry between Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and LN advocates, with the former arguing that the BCH hard fork is a better answer to Bitcoinâs scalability issue than the LN second-layer solution.
In Poketoshi usersâ tweets, an in-game rival avatar named âBCashâ suffers a bitter fate on the new LN-enabled gaming platform:
đđđđđđđđ pic.twitter.com/YT6lLmxsKS
â masen (@masen_io) June 16, 2018
â bittoq (@bittoquant) June 16, 2018
In February this year, Laszlo Hanyecz, the man who completed the worldâs first documented BTC transaction for a physical item in 2010 by paying 10,000 BTC for two pizzas, repeated his historic purchase with Lightning Network - with the caveat that he had to get his friend in London to âsubcontractâ out the pizza delivery to a local pizza place in order to pay using LN, given that âpizza/bitcoin atomic swap softwareâ was as yet unavailable.
In March, LN made major steps towards mainstream adoption by seeing its first mainnet product implementation go live, following which several more user-oriented tools have come online from private developers.
The first user mobile wallet built for Lightning Network launched April 4.
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