Liebe Steemit-Freunde,

i reported on March 28th. about current usage of Testnet and also Mainnet des Lightning Network. If you wanna read german version please look here.

Today i'll give a update and compare with past numbers.. and maybe Binance is already present on LN? Let's see:

Testnet Usage

Date	Number Nodes	Number Channels	Increase Nodes %	Increase Channels %
1/12/2018	660	2163	-	-
2/11/2018	1811	5693	+174%	+163%
3/04/2018	1870	5042	+3%	-11%
3/28/2018	1432	3286	-23%	-35%
4/17/2018	834	2214	-42%	-33%

The numbers for nodes and channels are decreasing on Testnet significantly in the last 20 days. That means interest for usage of the Testnet is lowering further like observed last time. But that's not important because the usage of the Mainnet is much more important.. you'll see below in this article:

Link for testnet explorer

CLICK IMAGE

Mainnet Usage - what really counts!

CLICK IMAGE

The number of channels is further increasing. But the number above is different or higher compared to lnmainnet.gaben.win. The old ideoflux-site is down and contained also the number of nodes. But the trend for both is clearly up! The Mainnet usage is increasing, maybe we see a shift of convinced Testnet users to the Mainnet which would be a good sign. Let's look at the pure numbers:

Date	Number Nodes	Number Channels	Increase Nodes %	Increase Channels %
1/24/2018	328	854	-	-
2/11/2018	633	1819	+93%	+130%
3/04/2018	945	2121	+49%	+17%
3/28/2018	1160	2605	+23%	+23%
4/17/2018	1604	5136	+38%	+97%

The following chart visualizes the accelerated development of new nodes:

If we look for the channels, the number has doubled!:

We see accelerated growth in comparison to the prior time frame. May that be something like a viral effect for the Lightning Network? It progesses forward at least. To get the right perspective the number of nodes increased by factor 5x and the number of channels by factor 6x!

CLICK IMAGE

Just to get a better sense following the node network picture from February 11th 2018:

The growth of the Lightning Network quite clear!

Recent News!

NFC for Bitcoin Payment

NFC or near field communication provides touchless payment with smartphones or even implanted chip. coindesk shows who develops currently such solution.. Following an older video where someone shows how Bitcoin gets under your skin 😅

I Put A Payment Chip In My Hand To Replace My Wallet video by BuzzFeed
BO Trading

Cointelegraph explains the Lightning Network auf

If you don't know what it is or want refresh your knowledge maybe a good start to read.

..but this Lightning Network .. is getting so huge 👀 even my computer slows down when i scroll with my mouse! 😂

A Reddit reported about eerie events while watching the Lightning mainnet on #recksplorer. He experienced slowdowns with the visualization of the many knots and lines, which is a good sign for LN! 😁👍 The wording of the title made me laugh, because it sounded a bit spooky.. but that the things dreams made of..

Bet against the Lightning Network?

Would you wear a Bitcoin Cash T-Shirt if you're a Bitcoin core developer? Promised is promised if you lose a bet like here ..should someone stand by his word.

Overall we see progress forward, 2 steps forward, 1 step back, 2 steps forward,..

What do you think about the acceleration of the mainnet usage for LN?

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