The bitcoin community is celebrating what may have been the first Lightning Network (LN) transaction on the Bitcoin mainnet. In addition, the good news is that the operation was "instant and free".
Fast and Cheap Transactions
The LN implementation promises to significantly reduce Bitcoin transaction rates while enabling near-instant transactions.
The Reddit user btc_throwaway1337 announced that he has successfully used LN on the main bitcoin network to make a purchase. Specifically, the user btc_throwaway1337 announced:
I used the Lightning Network mainnet (via lnd) to buy an AR300M VPN router through TorGuard, and it's here! This may have been the first physical purchase in LN.
He described the shopping experience as follows:
Everything was fast, easy, painless and, most importantly, instant and free!
User btc_throwaway1337 also provided proof of purchase, shown here, indicating that the financing transaction for the channel cost about $ 2.40.
And because TorGuard already has open channels with sellers and users, it has been able to use the same channel to route payments to others.
TorGuard is an anonymous virtual private network (VPN) provider, proxy and e-mail services.
Lightning Network Nodes and Channel Propagation
Bitcoin's Lightning Network is a decentralized system where participants can implement micropayment channels without trust to perform one or more payment operations outside the blockchain.
To learn more about Lightning Network, read our guide: Understanding the Lightning Network, Part 1: Building a Bidirectional Payment Channel
The channels reside in the bitcoin blockchain. Transactions occur between channels. Upon completion, these transactions are passed, as a single transaction, to the blockchain. Once the payment channel is closed, the transactions are transcribed into the Bitcoin blockchain.
Consequently, regardless of the number of transactions performed, the blockchain is accessed only twice, at the channel opening and at the channel closing.
The implementation of LN nodes is gaining momentum. Currently LN has more than 67 nodes and 128 channels running on the mainnet with a capacity of 133758803 satoshis, about US $ 17,128.16 USD.
The chart below shows the impressive progress of LN:
Lightning Network technology is still an experience. However, the growing number of nodes and channels already tested predicts that full implementation of the LN will be forthcoming.
Bitcoin's perspective seems brighter because LN, combined with Segwit, Schnorr Signatures, and other schemas are concrete optimizations aimed at solving Bitcoin's most pressing problem: scalability.
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