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
Announcing our first Lightning mainnet release, lnd 0.4-beta!
Today, we at Lightning Labs are announcing the release of lnd 0.4-beta! This release marks the 4th major release of lnd and the first Lightning mainnet beta, an important milestone. With this release, lnd has gained a considerable feature set, deeper cross-implementation compatibility, a new specialized wallet seed, comprehensive fault-tolerance logic, a multitude of bug fixes, and much more! This release is also the first release of lnd that has the option to run on Bitcoin’s mainnet, with the safety, security, and reliability features necessary for real-world, real money usage.
Connecting Blockchains: Instant Cross-Chain Transactions On Lightning
Since the activation of segwit, there’s been a renewed excitement around the idea of cross-chain atomic swaps. Up until a few days ago, some old school swaps were set up to trade 1000 Bitcoin, approximately $8M, for a now-defunct altcoin, and a handful of atomic swaps have been successfully performed involving notable segwit-enabled chains. Today, Lightning Labs is excited to announce that we have successfully tested the first Lightning cross-chain atomic swap between the Bitcoin and Litecoin testnets!
Announcing Our Lightning Desktop App, Now Available for Testing
Today, we're thrilled to be releasing a new cross-platform demo Desktop App for lnd. The release of this new demo wallet kicks-off a two-week "testing blitz" during which we hope Lightning users with a technical inclination can start testing the wallet, giving feedback, filing bugs, etc. You can download the Lightning Desktop App from our official release on Github!