What is Lightning?

A high level primer on Bitcoin’s most well known second layer tech.

We’re now in the home stretch of the first edition of the Bitcoin Times.

In the last chapter, we closed out with comparisons between Bitcoin & the internet. In the next few, we’ll give some high level understanding of the concepts of second layer tech, with the focus being on Lightning.

Giving Lightning the explanation and time it deserves is out of the scope of this paper, but I’ll attempt to give you enough of an understanding to go further down the rabbit hole with….

Imagine a network, where each of the participants are not only route ‘users’, but also route operators. Where every participant becomes a node, that strengthens and broadens the network for not only themselves, but for everybody using it.

The best analogy I can think of is the internet (once again). The internet really exploded, when we became not only ‘consumers of content’, but also creators and routers of this data and content.

Testament to this explosion is the company which arguably capitalized on this the most. Facebook is barely 15yrs old and is one of the largest in the world. It gave everyone a forum to consume, create and share content; in other words — everyone was a node that made Facebook more valuable (and not just in relation to its market cap).

Conceptual way to understand the network effect layers have

What happens when you apply that same concept of read / write / route to money and payments?

In short — it changes the game.