The hill was trembling ...

News ! The first Lightning beta release for the live bitcoin network, lnd 0.4 - announced!

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 is also the first release of lnd that has an option to run on Bitcoin’s mainnet, with the necessary safety, security, and fault-tolerance features required for real-world, real money usage.

Atomic Multipath Payments (AMP) - allows large Lightning transactions to be divided into a series of smaller transactions as they’re sent over the Lightning Network, but in such a way that they’re automatically joined back together. The user sees only the total amount of the transaction, without needing to be aware that AMP is being used behind the scenes.

AMPs also ease the mental burden of using channels, allowing a user to interpret their balance readily as the simply the sum of their balance in the channels they own. This is made possible by the ability to send and receive an AMP-like payment over multiple channels, at both source or sink.

A few of the highlights :

Bitcoin Core support

New seed format, deterministic keys - a new and improved key creation and recovery system makes it much easier to backup lnd nodes and also makes recovery from data loss or corruption much simpler and more reliable.

Vastly improved fault-tolerance - safety and security of user funds is of the utmost importance, and a great deal of effort has gone into making lnd secure and stable in the event of power failures, network failures, hardware failures, or other unexpected or adversarial conditions.

Smarter Path-Finding - introduces an improved management for constructing payment routes. The system, dubbed Mission Control, incorporates feedback from previous payment attempts, to update the view of the network in response to temporary bottlenecks or failures.

Automated Contract Resolution - sweeping funds back into a user’s wallet is now handled by a concert of subsystems, that together decide how and when to spend all output types generated by an operating channel. Making this process automated, fault-tolerant, and intelligent has demanded an immense amount of effort, but critical to the safety of funds managed by lnd.

Segwit Only - lnd has removed support for now-obsolete P2PKH addresses, favoring both native Segwit and P2SH. As a result, all transactions, even regular on chain transactions, will benefit from lower fees and be healthier for the network.

Routing node metrics - lnd now provides tools to track fees and payments at high-volume, which is of particular interest to those operating transaction routing nodes. Tools such as these can be used to optimize revenue, throughput and reliability.

Combine this with automatic channel creation and you get a system where you can receive on LN any amount of bitcoins, as the capacity of channels do not really matter, and the receiver can re-balance their funds automatically by opening more channels to themselves.

The lightning network is an off-chain solution, meaning it is not a change to the core code but rather a solution which would run on top of the Bitcoin network inside its built-in scripting language.

Digital currencies which are designed off Bitcoin also have their own built-in scripting language, which means they can easily be modified to run the lightning network. Coins such as Litecoin and Decred, for instance, have plans to implement the lightning network.

Ethereum was not designed off the Bitcoin technology, however it does have its own built-in scripting language that does allow for integration of the lightning network.

Let's see what would happen...