By Andreas Antonopoulos, Olaoluwa Osuntokun & Rene Pickhardt
If someone loaded a shotgun of lightning knowledge and sprayed it at a wall, it would be this book. I would give this 5 stars, but I feel it’s got some missing pieces and could be refined to be more coherent as a whole.
It’s very high impact and covers the Lightning network broadly.
This is not a book for the noobie bitcoiner. It’s technical, requires patience and dedication to get through.
But it is so worth reading. If you have a desire to understand lightning more, it’s technical minutia or how things work generally, this is the book for you.
I came away from the book not understanding lightning fully, but having more answers and questions to look into, a better idea of where to look for answers, and a better idea on what lightning is and how it functions.
This is not an instructional book for setting up and running a lightning node (despite their being a chapter dedicated to this, which should probably be improved with external resources for just that).
But it does offer many clues to the self taught Bitcoin amateur on what is the cutting edge of Bitcoin technology. I don’t see lightning and other second layer networks stopping. Long term, they will only accelerate and perhaps even become the primary use-case for Bitcoin’s layer 1.
There is not a lot of published literature about lightning yet. So this book is by far the best one out there, if not the only one.
You can pick up a lot of subtle useful nuances about lightning and second layers by just passively reading this book.
Some things that stood out for me were:
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The abacus nature of lightning channels and liquidity.
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How your nodes channel liquidity is used/useful in others routing of HTLC’s.
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WTF is even an HTLC and why PTLC’s are superior and are enabled by Taproot and will help scale lightnings privacy and capacity generally.
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That there is a whole legion of volunteer lightning devs out their who are low key superhero’s asking for nothing. (You guys are the real MVP’s. )
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That updating your channel state/fee policy every two weeks can be a best practice, as a way to advertise your channels to the network so they don’t get stale in the eyes of other nodes network graphs.
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Fee policy dynamics and specific units.
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The state of the lightning network is much more dynamic and upgrade-able than Bitcoin layer 1, which makes things much more fun and permissionless for developers to mess around. I like that it’s forwards and backwards compatible. Though I do worry about hostile bifurcation scenarios long term and centralization.
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It is imperative, or at least a high priority, that running a lightning node be accessible to anyone who wants to do so long term. This may be more difficult than it appears, due to UX issues currently, and eventually resource constraints.
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Lightning, and to a certain extent Bitcoin layer 1, are currently operating under a light adversarial environment in my view (it can get worse). Making both networks more robust to certain DOS attacks is not very sexy from a development perspective, but imperative long term. Concern for corporate and nation state adversarial actions should be top of mind by devs looking to fortify layer 2’s and 1.
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Taproot was a god send for the lightning network. As a result Lightning is a lot more robust in multiple ways, and we are only now seeing some green shoots from this. It is still early days, its will get so much better.
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There is a lot more work to do on making lightning and layer 2’s more robust generally, and also accessible to the average user. Luckily, Both seem to be moving apace with great acceleration.
With that in mind, I hope Bitcoin AND Lightning devs make good choices in their designs that focus on empowering end users rather than ensnare them in third party middleman mouse traps, or enable shitcoin gambling dynamics.
Unfortunately many devs seem to be in this latter camp, knowingly or unknowingly. Fiat incentives, I get it. But please consider giving back when you can or when you “make it”.
To those of you who are in the former camp (you know who you are),
Thank You For Your Service.
TLDR: Lightning & Layer 2’s are Bitcoin’s Future. Mastering The Lightning network is a good book for fundamental technical Lightning details.
Read it.