Six years ago already, and nearly eight years after buying pizza with the first real world bitcoin onchain purchase for physical goods, Lazlo Hanyecz returns to buy pizza over the Lightning Network. He, who also coded the original GPU miner when Bitcoin was worth 5 cents, carefully strategizes and describe the process step by step to prove the Lightning Network as a valid, faster, secure, safe and anonymous payment method. It would have been much easier if the pizzeria could have been running its own node, directly transacting with the seller through Bitcoin Lightning. He was able anyhow to do it without providing any personal information or undergoing boring identity verification processes.

At that time, the second bull market was ending, and the authorities were not even aware of what Bitcoin layer 2 Lightning Network was. They were just starting imposing KYC on exchanges and regulate this notable amount of money flowing into the digital realm. Today we do have so many alternatives to exchanges and people should not get caught on those traps only because they offer discounts or fake bonuses at registration. Leave those marketing bites to someone else!

Scalability and Speed: the Bitcoin blockchain is known to have limited transaction capacity, leading to slow processing times and high fees. The Lightning Network, operating as a "second layer" on top of the main Bitcoin block chain (not b̶l̶o̶c̶k̶c̶h̶a̶i̶n̶), is enabling off-chain transactions between users. This reduces the burden on the main blockchain, allowing for faster and cheaper transactions, making Bitcoin more suitable and accessible for everyday use.

Lower Fees: on-chain Bitcoin transactions can sometimes incur significant fees, especially during periods of high network congestion. Those transactions will be in the near future only accessible to a few, meanwhile, the Lightning Network facilitates near-instantaneous transactions with minimal fees, making micropayments more feasible. Have you tried zapping this post yet?

Wider Adoption: the faster and cheaper transactions offered by the Lightning Network make Bitcoin more attractive for businesses and individuals, potentially leading to wider adoption. So it's like writing a bunch of notes as post-it and collecting them in a notebook, instead of writing the whole accounting book in one go.

Security and privacy: The Lightning Network relies on cryptographic protocols to ensure the security of transactions. It obfuscates individual payment transactions within the channel that enable the transfer of the value between two or more nodes, offering in this way a higher level of privacy compared to on-chain transactions.

Today Lightning is a strong and resilient network of tens of thousands of nodes, interconnected by over 50k channels that, btw, also allow you to instantly zap ⚡️ posts and comments on this (and many other) website(s). Zaps are like likes 👍 but with a scarce orange value embedded into it 🧡.

This network is accessible by anyone freely, without KYC and without providing any personal information. I'll list below a few methods you can play with without compromising your privacy:

Do not trust any other app or client asking you for a phone number. Your phone number, in most of the cases, it's attached to your identity, Do you remember? You provided your ID to get that dirty SIM. If all the options above are too complicated for you, I suggest you to get an anonymized virtual SIM, also known as eSIM (Silent.Link is a good one, if not the best) and proceed using that number to any app that might ask for it. But remember, most of those apps are offered as custodial service, meaning you do not really own those sats!

Finally, in a nutshell:

Knowledge is your most valuable asset, after your time!