In September, during a summit held in Melbourne, Australia, LN infrastructure leader and Yalls.org CEO Alex Bosworth revealed some of the 30 improvements the community agreed to implement. Among these changes, developers will implement multi-page payments, double financing channels, and hidden destinations.
What Lightning Network is and how it works
Lightning Network consists of an implementation of a second layer of off-chain architecture over the bitcoin network to solve its scalability and response time challenges. What this initiative proposes is that the blockchain script be used exclusively to manage the opening and closing of bi-directional payment channels.
A user can send bitcoins to any other destination within the Lightning network. For this, the network routes each transaction following a route formed by several contiguous payment channels until reaching the final recipient. That is, to make a payment to another person, you have to jump from node to node until you reach the one that receives.
The payments made through this platform are processed almost instantaneously and with reduced commissions. In turn, the receiver of the funds can be sure that it will not suffer a double-spending attack, since none of the intermediate nodes can steal the funds by making the user keep full control of the new bitcoins received.
This is a breakthrough, considering that bitcoin had scalability problems during 2017. What happened is that the transactions in the bitcoin blockchain started to take longer, taking four to six hours to confirm the payment. To avoid this problem, the layer called Lightning Network was created, which allows operations to be carried out outside the blockchain between channels, between different businesses or people, not one by one, but using this network of shops. Once finished with the transaction, only two transactions are saved: the entry and exit to the blockchain of that Lightning Network.
This story originally appeared in Spanish at Cripto247
