Latest news about Bitcoin and all cryptocurrencies. Your daily crypto news habit.
There is a new initiative that has gained popularity on social media that is called the Lightning Torch. This initiative involves passing a lightning payment across nodes adding 10,000 satoshis each time a new node receives the payment. After it, the user would have to pass it to a new node.
Until now, since it debuted on January 19, the ‘Lightning Torch’ gathered 2.3 million satoshis, close to $78. The twitter user Hodlonaut started the tipping service tippin.me to send the first transaction believing that it was something fun to do.
He started by sending 100,000 Satoshis using the service provided by tippin.me and asking other users to add 10,000 each and passing it to others.
Some LN fun..
– I send 100k sats with https://t.co/va7XSnFii0 to the first person I choose to trust that replies to this. – That person adds 10k sats and sends 110k to someone (Either from reply to a new tweet, or this thread)
.. and so on
How many sats before it breaks?
— hodlonaut (@hodlonaut) January 19, 2019
The intention is to show how the Lightning Network (LN) can be used to make these transactions in an easy way. The LN is the scaling solution proposed for Bitcoin to scale without having to make on-chain changes. In the future it is expected for the LN to be able to process hundreds of thousands of transactions per second with very low fees and without congesting Bitcoin’s main network.
Apparently, the #LNTrustChain as they’ve called on Twitter has been broken by @SerWisdom69 who kept $9 dollars in BTC.
The #LNTrustChain lore is already very rich.. @SerWisdom69 will always be remembered as the guy who stole the chain at $9 though
— hodlonaut (@hodlonaut) January 29, 2019
During 2018, the Lightning Network has been expanding at a very fast pace. Indeed, it now supports around $2 million Bitcoin and has several thousands of nodes and channels. However, the LN is not ready to be deployed for commercial use. It might take longer for retail stores or individuals without technical knowledge to start using it.
There are some companies that are starting to implement different LN functionalities. For example, BitFury decided to bring payments to their cryptocurrency exchange in collaboration with BTCBIT.
At the time of writing this article, the Lightning Network has 5,771 nodes with 22,782 channels. Additionally, the network capacity has currently 606 BTC, representing an increase of 16% compared to just 30 days ago.
Disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not reflect the views of Bitcoin Insider. Every investment and trading move involves risk - this is especially true for cryptocurrencies given their volatility. We strongly advise our readers to conduct their own research when making a decision.