New video: What are payments channels? (quick explanation of how the Lightning Network works)
Hi there Steemers, hope you're having a great weekend and celebrating the BIP-91 lock in! :)
I've gotten a lot of questions from people as we head towards segwit being activated on Bitcoin as to what a payment channel actually is, and how the "Lightning Network" will magically solve all of the network's problems. In my latest video I try to break down the concepts and also explain some of the challenges this technology may face in the future.
Hope some people find this video useful - if you have any questions, just ask below in the comments.
Nice, i was wondering if alt channels for BTC payments would eventually cripple mining as the block reward are supposed to be replaced by fees. I think their must always be a small fee or no-one will want to mine.
Good point! I think a fee market will actually prop up around Lightning Node hubs so it'll be interesting to see how that competes with regular Bitcoin mining transaction fees.
that post was lightning! keep it up!
Appreciate the support, thanks!
hey jack,well explained,btw just realized your 1st post garnered 10k, then you left only to return last month , what happened if you don't mind me asking?
I got out of crypto for a while there because the community was getting me down and I got super busy IRL with my day job etc. All got a little too stressful! But now there seems to be a lot of smart, inquisitive minds looking at this stuff and my passion is helping educate people - so I thought I'm come back and try to help out. :)
I see, glad your back :)
One thing I always wondered about was sending along metadata with the payment. For example, if a platform wants to accept payment in Bitcoin, but needs metadata sent along to format the billing properly. Sounds like lightning network might be able to provide some options.
Good questions! You can embed metadata in Bitcoin transactions today using OP_RETURN. There's even a website dedicated to it: http://coinsecrets.org/
With Lightning it's still a Bitcoin transaction so you could do something similar, or there's potential for adding an additional "off-chain" metadata layer on top of the signed transactions as well... definitely an interesting use case that would help avoid blockchain bloat too :)
Wow this is like ELI5, thank you.