News — lightning network

September 29, 2008. It was a clear morning in New York City. However, the weather didn’t reflect the mood. By the end of the day the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted 778 points, representing the largest point drop in history. It prompted one of the most profound global recessions in recent times. Is it a coincidence that only a few weeks later in October, Satoshi Nakamoto released the now famous whitepaper: Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. When we reflect on 2008 it seems likely that the crash, triggered by the housing bubble, was the impetus for creating a trust-less financial...

As cryptomania ramped up last year, we saw a lot of hype around bitcoin - the currency. Note the use of the lowercase "b". The second usage "Bitcoin" is a reference to the ecosystem and is more focused on the Bitcoin protocol as opposed to the currency. I might say, "I paid 0.2 bitcoin for xyz" if I wanted to specify the exchange of bitcoin tokens. The distinction is small, but important. There's no certainty bitcoin will remain the defacto cryptocurrency of the future. However, it's undeniable that Bitcoin paved the way for new ways of thinking, as well as,...

Proof-of-Choose-Your-Name --- A lot of people who are just getting started with cryptocurrencies normally don't know much about consensus algorithms and what they are. However, they play a crucial part in making sure the blockchain remains a decentralised and fair system. What are consensus algorithms? In simple terms, consensus algorithms are processes which are used to achieve agreement on a value of data among distributed systems, such as the distributed ledger technology. In the crypto world, consensus algorithms do two very important things:  They ensure that the next block in a blockchain is the one and only true version of the block (prevent double spending); They keep the system from...

Lightning Network (LN) is a network of payment channels which exists outside the blockchain. Lightning Network relies on you opening a two-way trusted payment channel with another user which then turns into a network. The channel handles all the main transactions (opening and closing transactions) alongside all the secondary ones (all other transactions). All the main transactions are registered on the blockchain, but all the secondary ones exist only inside the Lightning Network payment channel that you have created. Let's imagine this in real life. Suppose you come to the pub for a few beers. You know that you'll be staying in that pub...