What is lightning network?
Lighting network (LN) is a offchain application that facilitates transactions on the Bitcoin-blochcain between participants. This means that users do not have to worry about the time required to have blocks validated on to the blockchain and the high transaction fees that come normally with it. The transaction time can be reduced from ten minutes to a few milliseconds. This can be realized because lightning network does not allow all transactions to take place in the blockchain. Various direct channels are being set up between participants (direct payment channels). In a kind of shared wallet between two participants, a certain amount of cryptocurrency is held as a balance.
This way Blockchain participants can use a payment channel for a longer period of time between each other and decide later on to send all the transactions that have been made during that time to the Blockchain at once. This way we don’t have to send every transaction to the blockchain to be validated, but can all those transactions be validated at once! This saves a lot of time and is a lot easier to use!
Solution of LN
Lightning network plays a big role in helping Bitcoin scale, but requires alot of other things such as SegWit and aggregated signatures to make it really become more scaleable. Not to forget about the high transaction fees you would normally have to pay outside the payments channels that are much less inside a payment channel, since you only pay fee for opening or closing a channel and every transaction made within the channel is as good as zero. What the benefits will be of using Lightning network for the future i don't know. I know what Lightning network is and what it try's to solve but scaleability remains a problem and with developments such as these i still feel like it's firefighting.
As of today we have 2779 nodes running that use a total of 7851 payment channels. This number has increased dramatically if you compare it to march 2018 when there were only 977 nodes running with 1827 payment channels. This shows there is a steady growth and demand for using the off-chain technology.
The lightning Network could have a major impact on the Bitcoin-Blockchain that we use today. However it can also become the complete opposite and that it bring more problems with it than it will do good. This is something w'll have to see for ourselves and i am still very enthusiastic that so many people help to create a better crypto economy for everybody!
