Our Lightning Desktop App Is Now on Mainnet!
by Tankred Hase and Valentine Wallace Today we’re excited to announce the first alpha release of the Lightning App for desktop on Bitcoin mainnet. This is still an early version targeted at testers, but it will give advanced users and developers a chance to start experimenting with a Lightning UX where users control their own funds powered by our Neutrino light client technology. This desktop release supports macOS, Windows, and Linux. It also represents an important stepping stone towards mobile while we continue to invest in performance and stability. We’re working as quickly as we can to get our mainnet iOS and Android apps out soon. Driving this release is a complete commitment to scaling the principles that Bitcoin was built on: privacy, security, and self-determination. For that we need to go beyond custodial solutions and enthusiast guides and deliver a great user experience for everyone. Scaling Bitcoin and Lightning to everyone means not requiring people to follow complex setup processes or hand over control of their funds to trusted counterparties. For everyone to truly explore what is possible with the Lightning Network, we needed to build a wallet that knocks down these barriers-to-entry and demonstrates what is possible when technology fights for the user.
Announcing lnd v0.6-beta!
Today, we’re excited to announce the latest release of lnd, v0.6-beta! Many items in this release were developed in response to the community feedback we’ve gotten since v0.5-beta and also in response to what we’ve learned as we’ve observed the tremendous growth in the Lightning Network over the last several months.
Loop Out In-depth
In a previous blog post we announced Loop Out, a non-custodial service to obtain inbound liquidity by offloading funds to a regular on-chain address. This post goes deeper into some of the technical details of Loop Out and assumes knowledge of Bitcoin, Lightning and hash locked contracts.
Announcing Lightning Loop Alpha: An Easier Way to Receive on Lightning
Today we’re excited to announce the initial release of Lightning Loop, a non-custodial service that makes it easier for people to receive funds on Lightning. As we’ve watched the network and the number of Lightning applications grow over the past year, many users have told us they were interested in a solution to help with receiving on Lightning. We’ve also seen more and more use cases, from earning satoshis on microwork sites, to selling goods with Lightning, to sending peer-to-peer payments around the world, where the ability to receive is key. Lightning channels are like tubes of money: the more you send the more you can receive, and the other way around. Money moves around in the tube, but the total amount of funds remains constant. So, unlike other payment systems, Lightning requires “inbound capacity” in order to receive funds. This initial release focuses on on the ability for people to receive with what we call Loop Out. Lightning Loop Out allows users to increase their receiving capacity by offloading their funds from the network while keeping channels open.
Lightning App Security & Architecture
by Tankred Hase In a recent post we covered the new Lightning App from a UX perspective. In this post we’ll dig deeper into its software architecture with a focus on security and threat modeling. App Architecture As depicted above, the desktop application is based on Electron. Electron allows cross-platform desktop applications to be developed from a single code base for Windows, Mac and Linux. It’s based on the Chromium project from Google and is being developed by GitHub.
Neutrino: The Lighter Side of Lightning
Our previous two posts in this series have been about Carol, a future Lightning user. For this post, we’ll be traveling back to the present, where Alice lives with substandard mobile Bitcoin apps. In Alice’s world, smartphones have been the predominant global computing platform for years, but the current generation of Bitcoin apps leave a lot to be desired. The options she’s tried have had major flaws in security, privacy, and/or ease-of-use. Several of today’s top mobile Bitcoin wallets are built on centralized services that present significant security risks. As a wise man said more than once: “Not your keys, not your Bitcoin.” Centralized services also risk exposure of users’ financial information (i.e. transaction histories). On the other hand, centralized services are faster, easier to use, and work for new users with small amounts of bitcoin. As a long-time, experienced bitcoiner, Alice has quite a few friends who have lost money with centralized services, so she decides to continue on her quest for a wallet that gives her full control of her bitcoins.
Announcing lnd v0.5-beta!
Today, we’re excited to announce the latest release of lnd, v0.5-beta! The key focus for this release was to enable end-user apps (aka “light clients”) with a BIP 157/158-compliant implementation of the Neutrino protocol. In addition, we’ve made major improvements in safety and security of user funds, along with features that lay the groundwork for the next release of lnd, which will focus on routing nodes. We've also added another Tor privacy option, and as always, we’ve made numerous improvements to optimize performance and increase reliability. A few of the highlights are listed below, and for the full details, please see the release notes.
The New Lightning App
by Tankred Hase Today we're excited to announce the release of the new version of our Lightning desktop app. This release includes a complete redesign and optimized backend targeted toward light clients. In a recent post we covered Lightning UX from a high level perspective and discussed which components and infrastructure would be required for a Lightning Network that is not only reliable but also usable by average users. In this post, we’ll highlight one crucial component of that puzzle, namely the Lightning App, which is our user-facing wallet application.
Exploring Lightning Network Routing
When we last left our hero Carol, she had successfully joined the Lightning Network and started making Lightning transactions. As she's become familiar with the user experience side of Lightning, she's also started to become more interested in Lightning from a technical standpoint. She's even thinking about running a Lightning routing node herself, with the goal of earning enough in routing fees to pay for her monthly BitFlix subscription. This post is oriented toward budding enthusiasts like Carol who are interested in running Lightning nodes, who are building applications for the Lightning Network, or who are just curious about Lightning. Note that this post is targeted at users who already have some basic knowledge of Lightning and payment channels.
Lightning User Experience: A Day in the Life of Carol
The goal of this post is to give the Bitcoin community and prospective Lightning users insight into what the end user experience of the Lightning Network will be like once the initial infrastructure components are complete. Here, we're focusing on the story of Carol, a new Lightning user, and we'll also be touching on some of the projects that we at Lightning Labs are working on that will make this experience a reality. Over the next few weeks and months, we'll be following up with additional posts that will provide more details about these projects and topics including routing, watchtowers, neutrino, mobile, backups and more. Meet Carol