Blockstream engineers Paul “Rusty” Russell and Dr. Christian Decker completed their first lightning transaction on Bitcoin’s testnet this week. The test transaction was made using the latest version of the Blockstream’s lightning prototype software, lightningd 0.5 and consisted of a digital purchase from a web-store.
Blockstream’s team is now the first to have conducted a successful and trustless transaction between two developers on Bitcoin’s testnet, which served as a “real” payment.
Blockstream’s first transaction was done over testnet, a network specifically designed for testing new Bitcoin features. Testnet also has SegregatedWitness deployed, which is required for the lightning network to function in a trustless and secure manner.
Despite the successful test, Russell and Decker explained it will still take some time before lightning transactions will happen on top of the main Bitcoin network. Before lightning can be rolled out, Segregated Witness must first be activated, bugs in lightningd must be found and fixed, and it must be made more robust against misconfiguration. Then, the Blockstream team wants to create libraries to allow web developers to play with constructing their use-cases.
Ah, if only they could see us today.
Node counts decreasing. Channel counts decreasing. Overall channel capacity decreasing. Percentage of Bitcoiners still using fiat, flat to up.
But SN exists! Zeus NWC! So many wallets have LN!
Don’t be such a doomer!
I think it's too important of a subject. If the trends are going in the wrong direction, and public opinion is still the same 2 decades later.... it's not doomerism, it's table-pounding. I'm trying to sound the alarm.
We simply are dropping the ball in this war against fiat.
This all started with a war on fiat.
The first shot: "Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks"
Now, Bitcoiners are okay with fiat sticking around. They're okay with Store-of-Value being 99% of the narrative, ignoring and even demeaning the importance of Medium-of-Exchange.
Yeah but who’s fault is that? The market determines what wins. Better tech wins. Bitcoin is still incredibly difficult to use and spend. Plus people don’t like in your face volatility.
People will dump fiat when Bitcoin is better. Better at everything including payments on and offline.
Bitcoin already is better, in the most important ways. It already is better money. Yet, it's barely being used.
It will never be better as a MoE, payment system. Referring to user experience, centralized systems will always be better than decentralized ones. We can't compete on that metric.
So, we can't wait, because the day you envision will never come. We start using the money that we know is better, and show the world that it's worth the UX tradeoff in order to be free, wealthy, and sovereign. We set an example, and start doing everything we can to stop using fiat.
....
wow, that's sad.
Yes it is.
I'm not here to build and support a "parallel monetary network" to go alongside fiat. I'm here to put an end to fiat.
But I appear to be alone. Bitcoiners today think a parallel system is the way to go, because it allows them to conveniently continue using fiat, guilt-free. They don't have to change anything in their lives, or be controversial in public, with their chosen path.
Bitcoin's incentives, on their own, can only get us about as far as gold. Store of value... hardly worth having over stocks or real estate. Not a fiat killer, just another investment option for the wealthy to allocate 3% of their fiat into.
We're gonna need to see Bitcoiners get angry at fiat. Otherwise, I fear we've reached peak MoE adoption.... peak Lightning adoption. It's all on the downtrend now. Even self-custody appears to be on the downtrend.
Healthy NGU will come from more people spending (while boycotting fiat), not from more rich institutions hodling.
A decade in and we still standing strong. The next decades will be wild
We'd better not miss what's on testnet today, that's what will be infrastructure in the coming years
👏👏 I love LN 👏👏
Ah super cool anecdote thanks!