Original author:Jaleel、Luccy，BlockBeats
Original editor: Jack, BlockBeats
In crypto circles, “legitimacy” has been one of the most frequently used words in the past two years. Although this statement first came from Ethereum (Vitalik wrote the blog Legitimacy is the scarcest resource in the crypto ecosystem”, explaining the concept of legitimacy), but there is also a lack of legitimacy in the Bitcoin community. For most people, the “child of legitimacy” in the Bitcoin community is the Lightning Network.
As the concept of Bitcoin Ecology is gaining momentum, various Bitcoin expansion plans such as side chains and virtual machines have entered the horizons of investors. However, the mainstream view of the market on the Lightning Network still seems to remain at payment. Channel stage. As the Bitcoin ecosystem continues to develop, the Lightning Network begins to face transformation pressure. This article sorts out the origin of Lightning Network, its two main development entities, and explains its current difficulties and future development directions.
Satoshi Nakamoto’s email
When mentioning Bitcoin, Lightning Network is definitely a keyword that cannot be avoided.
In the early years, there was little public understanding of Bitcoin, and the role of Bitcoin evangelists was not as large, so asking Satoshi Nakamoto directly was the only way to get a clear answer. In 2011, software developer Mike Hearn also devoted a lot of energy to Bitcoin development while working as a senior software engineer and technical director at Google. Over the roughly five years of Bitcoin development, Mike Hearn had various conversations with Satoshi via email, which he later published as a historic document on his blog.
On March 7, 2011, Mike Hearn just released BitCoinJ (an open source Bitcoin client library that uses Java to build and implement the Bitcoin network protocol) under the name of Google under the Apache 2 license, and is preparing to release it in the next month or two. Complete the implementation of the complete client mode.
He gave it to Satoshi NakamotoSend email, asked: I still dont fully understand why the serial number is an attribute of the TX input and not the TX itself?
In response, Satoshi Nakamotos reply was: Intermediate transactions do not need to be broadcast, only the final results will be recorded by the network. Just before nLockTime, all parties and some witness nodes broadcast the highest sequence tx they saw. This is Satoshi Nakamoto’s explanation of payment channels, which is also the prototype of the Lightning Network and the birth of its legitimacy.
If you go back even further, Bitcoin 0.1 included acode draft, which allows users to update a transaction before it is confirmed by the network.
Draft payment channels included in Bitcoin 0.1. Source: GitHub Lightning Network speakers: Blockstream and Lightning Labs
Payment channels and network design have evolved over the years, with developments becoming clearer since the release of the Bitcoin Lightning Network white paper in early 2015. Surprisingly, in the months that followed, throughout the spring and summer of 2015, disagreements over Bitcoin’s scaling issues and block size caps turned into public disputes.
In December 2015, Gregory Maxwell (one of the founders of Blockstream) proposed a proposal in a Bitcoin developer emailExpansion plan roadmap, which includes a focus on the Lightning Network. Most people in the Bitcoin technology community expressed their opinions on the increase in the capacity of the Bitcoin system.support, and implemented in the Bitcoin Core project. This has aroused everyones expectations for the Lightning Network. The ensuing debate over Bitcoin expansion unexpectedly pushed the Lightning Network to the forefront.
Bitcoin Factory Blockstream
There seems to be a rumor among the public that Blockstream is the talker behind Bitcoin. Such rumors are not groundless.
On October 23, 2014, Blockstream, one of the most influential companies building the Lightning Network, was established. Adam Back, the inventor of hashcash, gathered many Bitcoin developers such as Matt Corallo, Greg Maxwell, Pieter Wuille, etc. to establish Blockstream. Released their sidechain white paper.
Since its inception, Blockstream has been a pioneer in developing the Lightning Network. As the founder of Blockstream, Adam Backs influence cannot be underestimated. In a foreign cryptocurrency influence ranking list, Adam Back ranked fourth. The top three are: Andreas Antonopoulos (early evangelist of Bitcoin), V God (founder of Ethereum), Nick Szabo ( The originator of the concept of Smart Contract).
Foreign “cryptocurrency” influence rankings
To talk about the reason why Adam Back has such a huge influence, we have to go back to 1997. At that time, the Internet was just emerging, and email was regarded as the first application for people to communicate at that time. However, the large amount of spam made people overwhelmed, and many people began to try to solve it. Adam Back published an email with the subject A partial hash collision based postage scheme. In the email, he introduced Hashcash to people using a technology called proof of work to prevent spam. Mechanisms. Therefore, Adam Back is often called the Father of PoW.
These are all because Satoshi Nakamoto mentioned Adam Backs Hashcash in the Bitcoin white paper, which made it famous and gradually established its strong position in the encryption industry.
Among the founding members and major contributors of Blockstream are key members of the Bitcoin development team, such as Greg Maxwell and Pieter Wuille.
Greg Maxwell is a renowned cryptographer and software engineer who has made important contributions to Bitcoins privacy and scalability. For example, the homomorphic key derivation used in BIP 32, as well as trustless privacy protection technologies such as CoinJoin and blind proof. Pieter Wuille has been a Bitcoin Core developer since May 2011. In 2012, Wuille released BIP 32, adding a layered deterministic wallet to Bitcoin, and also participated in the development of key technologies such as Segregated Witness (SegWit).
While anyone can theoretically contribute code to the BTC Core project, only those with commit access can incorporate that code into the actual BTC protocol. Pieter Wuille was one of the only five people who could submit access to the BTC code repository at the time, and he was also the person who contributed the most code to the BTC project after Satoshi Nakamoto.
In 2015, when the discussion about expansion in the Bitcoin community became increasingly heated, a paper A Fast and Scalable Payment Network with Bitcoin Duplex Micropayment Channels by the Zurich Institute of Technology was released in late 2015. The papers solution relies heavily on timelocks as a countdown device for channel validity, and a cryptographic technique called an invalidation tree to invalidate stale channel transactions. This also became the prototype technology on which the Lightning Network later relied. The two authors of this paper, Christian Decker and Roger Wattenhofer, later joined Blockstream.
Surprisingly, in the months that followed, and even throughout the spring and summer of 2015, disagreements over Bitcoin’s scaling issues and block size caps turned into public disputes. On August 15, 2015, two early Bitcoin technology pioneers, Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn, jointly announced on their blog that their new version of Bitcoin will be activated. This day was later known as the Block Size War. During this period, Blockstream made a great contribution to the promotion of the Lightning Network.
In December 2015, Gregory Maxwell (one of the founders of Blockstream) proposed a proposal in a Bitcoin developer emailExpansion plan roadmap, which includes a focus on the Lightning Network. Most people in the Bitcoin technology community expressed their opinions on the increase in the capacity of the Bitcoin system.support, and implemented in the Bitcoin Core project. This has aroused everyones expectations for the Lightning Network.
At that time, there were two completely different views on the dispute between the Bitcoin Core development team and Bitmain.
On the one hand, Bitmain supporters believe that the Bitcoin Core development team is a group of stubborn programmers who stick to the original Bitcoin core and refuse to make necessary changes and adaptations. They believe that these developers are immersed in their own technical world, ignoring the real needs of Bitcoin development, and are old guys that hinder progress. On the other hand, supporters of the Bitcoin Core development team believe that Bitmain is using its influence and information advantages in the industry to deliberately distort facts and mislead the public and miners.
Blockstream co-founder Adam Back came to Hong Kong to attend the Consensus Conference on behalf of Bitcoin developers and mediators on both sides. As the earliest blockchain development company, Blockstreams company not only interacts with Bitcoin Cores personnel, but also funds their development work. The signature of Blockstream CEO Adam Back made everyone think that the developers agreed to the Hong Kong Consensus.
However, after the meeting, Bitcoin Core stated that the developers who promised various changes at the meeting were all programmers who did not have permission to modify the Core source code. None of the five people with the authority to change the Core source code attended, nor did they sign.
Adam Back also stated that his signature at the meeting only represented an individual and could not agree to the Hong Kong Consensus on behalf of Bitcoin Core. His attitude turned 180 degrees and he strongly opposed the Hong Kong Consensus that he personally signed not long ago. The Hong Kong Consensus was rejected by Bitcoin Core, but at the same time, the Lightning Network gained the legitimacy consensus of Bitcoin developers.
In the summer of 2017, Segwit was activated on the Bitcoin blockchain, paving the way for the implementation of the Lightning Network. It can be said that Greg Maxwell and Pieter Wuille played a crucial role in the upgrade of the Bitcoin network—especially the introduction of Segregated Witness (SegWit) and the development of the Lightning Network.
Because Blockstream employs many Bitcoin Core developers, Blockstream has a large say in Bitcoin development and has attracted a lot of criticism. For example, some people say that Blockstream actually controls the development of Bitcoin (some even say that Blockstream uses trolls in the Bitcoin community to suppress opponents and control public opinion). According to analysis by Whale Calls, 12% -20% of Bitcoin code updates come from Blockstream developers.
A few years ago, most of the communitys analysis of Adam Back was that he wanted to profit from Bitcoin. Because Blockstreams business model is to sell side chain/Lightning Network products and services, if the block capacity is expanded, the side chain/Lightning Network will be useless, and then Blockstream, as a profit-oriented company, will not be able to obtain income.
Lightning Labs: Authors of Lightning Network white paper part ways
Lightning Labs greatest legitimacy may come from its founders, Joseph Poon and Tadge Dryja, the authors of the Lightning Network white paper.
In the fall of 2015, this San Francisco-based startup, led by Elizabeth Stark, brought together two co-authors of the Lightning Network white paper, Joseph Poon and Tadge Dryja, to start a business and stand side by side with BlockStream. The biggest difference between the two is that Lightning Labs uses the Go programming language, while Blockstream uses the C programming language.
Lightning Labs not only made key contributions to the theoretical foundation of Lightning Network, but also released a beta version of Lightning Network in March 2018. This move marked an important milestone in the development of Lightning Network.
The early team at Lightning Labs is no less competitive than Blockstream.
Before writing the Lightning Network white paper, Dryja created the peer-to-peer trading system mirro, and added the concept of prediction markets. He also studied a PoW algorithm Hashimoto, which is the predecessor of the Dagger Hashimoto algorithm, and the latter is the Ethereum PoW algorithm. Alternative algorithm before ethash is launched.
In addition to Dryja, Poon, another author of the Lightning Network white paper, is also a top developer in the encryption industry. For example, Vitalik recently published a new article supporting the return of Plasma, which is the second-layer expansion technology of Ethereum that he and Poon jointly launched in 2017. The two are strong partners working on scalability projects. At the same time, Poon also worked on a project called handshake that inherited the namecoin idea.
As the co-founder and CEO of Lightning Labs, Elizabeth Stark is well-known in the fields of cryptocurrency and open Internet. She is a well-known entrepreneur and educator with significant influence in the Bitcoin community.
Olaoluwa Osuntokun (Roasbeef) is another co-founder of Lightning Labs and an outstanding Bitcoin developer who has made important contributions to the research and development of the Lightning Network. He developed the lbd protocol based on the lit protocol, which has been recognized by more developers.
Among the engineers of lightning labs, Alex Akselrod must be mentioned. As early as 4 months before the release of the Lightning Network white paper, Alex Akselrod first proposed a two-way payment channel proposal. The core idea is to introduce a decreasing time lock, which allows the recipient to send funds to the sender a limited number of times. Alex Bosworth paid his phone bill by establishing a Lightning channel with Bitrefill, creating the first transaction on the Lightning Network.
Image source: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=814770.msg9185225#msg9185225
However, at the end of 2016, when the Lightning Network company was just a year old, the two authors of the Lightning Network white paper split due to a quarrel.
When working at Lightning Labs, the first version of the protocol developed by Dryja was called LIT, which was not compatible with the BOLT developed by Blockstream. However, the LND protocol developed by Olaoluwa, CTO of Lightning Labs, was compatible with BOLT and was gradually recognized by more developers. Later, it was completed Those who are on top.
Therefore, Lightning Labs decided to focus on LND, and Dryja chose to leave Lightning Labs and join the research community of the MIT Media Lab to continue developing Lit. Interestingly, this research community also employs top Bitcoin Core developer Wladimir van der Laan and several Bitcoin Core contributors.
In this regard, the two authors of the Lightning Network white paper, Joseph Poon and Tadge Dryja, parted ways.
Although it lost Tadge Dryja, Lightning Labs gained the support of Jack Dorsey. After leaving Twitter, Jack Dorsey actively promoted Bitcoin and the Lightning Network through his company Block Inc. (formerly known as Square Inc.).
In 2018, Dorsey participated in Lightning Labs’ seed round of financing, and in 2022, he participated in Lightning Labs’ $10 million Series A financing, aiming to support its use in building the Bitcoin Visa network. It can be said that a series of development and promotion of Lightning Labs are inseparable from the former CEO of Twitter Jack Dorsey.
Subsequently, Squares Square Crypto project was renamed Spiral and developed the Lightning Network Development Kit LDK (Lightning Development Kit), allowing developers to integrate Lightning Network transactions into mobile devices and sales terminals. In addition, Square also launched Cash App, a mobile payment solution that integrates the Lightning Network.
In addition to Jack Dorsey, Lightning Labs well-known investors and institutions include: Digital Currency Group; Robinhood; Ripples XpringRipples investment arm; former global co-founder Howard Morgan; Goldman Sachs head of securities department John Pfeffer (former KKR member) and Forbes 30 Under 30 celebrity Jill Carlson.
Since then, protocols and applications related to the Lightning Network have gradually become more abundant, such as OmniBOLT, an enhanced version of the BOLT protocol, Cash APP and Strike, the payment platform that supports the Bitcoin Lightning Network, etc.
Although multiple teams have begun developing the Lightning Network, the contributions of Blockstream and Lightning Labs are the ones that cannot be ignored. In the history of the legitimacy evolution of the Lightning Network, their role cannot be underestimated.
Driven by Blockstream and Lightning Labs, in those years, there were only two scaling solutions for Bitcoin, one was the Lightning Network and the other was others.
The Crossroads of Lightning Network
Although it has had absolute orthodoxy over the years, it is obvious that there have been more and more voices denying the Lightning Network in the past year, especially from some senior developers.
The Lightning Network has been defrauding Bitcoin users of their time, energy and money for 6 years. Nostr founder Fiatjaf said. It’s fair to say that the debate over Bitcoin’s Lightning Network has intensified over the past two months. Recently, at least two developers have announced that they are quitting work related to the Lightning Network.
Developers keep losing
On October 16, Lightning Network security researcher and developer Antoine RiardAn email, an in-depth discussion of the risk of fund loss faced by Lightning Network channels, which are mainly caused by replacement loop attacks in transaction pools. He specifically mentioned a transaction relay interference attack affecting Lightning Network channels, which is entirely possible in practice and can occur even without network transaction pool congestion.
At the same time, Riard said that heFrom now on, we will stop participating in the development of the Lightning Network., because this new replacement loop attack would put the Lightning Network in a very dangerous situation. However, from an optimistic point of view, this kind of attack is extremely complex and not easy to implement.
Two weeks after Antoine Riard announced his departure, on October 30, Anton Kumaigorodski, the developer of the first mobile lightning wallet, also announced his resignation on Nostr. Anton Kumaigorodski is the developer of Bitcoin Lightning Wallet (BLW) and Simple Bitcoin Wallet (SBW). He also developed the Scala IMMORTAN library, which allows building mobile-optimized applications on top of Lightning Network clients. Contrary to many Lightning Network critics, he is fully aware of why LN remains challenging as a technology. Three reasons for his departure:
1. Serious Lightning Network development is difficult and time-consuming. The entire Lightning Network protocol is overly complex and getting worse. At this point, only a handful of well-known experts can develop it at a very slow pace. Philosophically, I think Bitcoin as a protocol should have a complexity barrier so that it doesnt get past the point where laypeople cant understand and trust it, and I think the Lightning Network has passed that barrier.
2. After more than 6 years of struggle, the Lightning Network has transcended a community of largely ideological users with no apparent success or perspective. My point is that ultimately the Lightning Network is not what the market as a whole expects from Bitcoin and people should look in other directions other than stupid payments and not focus too much on the Lightning Network.
3. Remaining Lightning Network demand is primarily absorbed by various hosting solutions. A truly non-custodial Lightning Network wallet will always be worse than a custodial wallet in terms of user experience, and historically weve seen the majority of remaining users always choose convenience over control. This makes developing end-user unmanaged Lightning Network solutions feel like the most thankless thing in the world.
After gaining a lot of attention following the publication of his BitVM paper, Bitcoin researcher and developer Robin Linus added: Its time to admit that we oversold each other the Lightning Network, perhaps as a result of the post-blocksize war trauma. A form of post-stress disorder. It’s time to get over it. Lightning Network doesn’t work for the masses.”
River CEO and CTO Alexander Leishman also pointed out the user experience (UX) challenges of consumer self-hosting in the Lightning Network, The Lightning Network is very suitable for hosting to hosting transfer. The Lightning Network brings huge benefits to consumer self-hosting. user experience challenges. He highlighted the difficulties faced by ordinary users in managing their Lightning Network transactions.
In fact, the potential scalability limitations of the Lightning Network were already apparent in its early development stages and are mentioned in the Lightning Network’s white paper, specifically regarding the possibility that required soft forks in the future will not be supported. Considered a potential constraint on Lightning Network scalability.
Against this background, what are the plans of Blockstream and Lightning Labs, the two major Lightning Network companies?
Pressure from side chains
In addition to the Lightning Network, Blockstream’s focus in recent years has been the side chain product Liquid Network.
In 2014, Adam Back, Matt Corallo, Luke-Jr and others co-published the paper Enabling Blockchain Innovations with Pegged Sidechains. This paper publicly proposed for the first time the concept of promoting blockchain innovation through anchoring side chains.
On October 12, 2015, Blockstream announced the release of its Liquid sidechain prototype, which allows the transfer of assets between the Liquid sidechain and the Bitcoin main chain. On October 11, 2018, a production-ready implementation of Liquid sidechain was officially launched, called Liquid Network, which aims to promote interoperability between the Bitcoin main chain and Liquid sidechain to expand the functionality of Bitcoin.
The side chain that was born as a prototype of Adam Backs paper is not only Liquid, but also Drivechain.
In a 2015 blog post, LayerTwoLabs co-founder Paul Sztorc further introduced the concept of Drivechain, proposing it as a way to avoid hard forks due to consensus disagreements, thereby preventing Bitcoin fragmentation. Drivechain introduces an innovative way to Bitcoin, allowing the creation and deletion of sidechains, as well as sending and receiving BTC on the so-called second layer - sidechains. Bitcoin and Drivechain form a parent-child chain relationship. Bitcoin is the parent and Drivechain is the child. Therefore, Drivechain itself does not issue native tokens. Instead, it relies entirely on BTC being transferred from the Bitcoin network.
Drivechains was created and relies on a blind merge mining concept that allows miners on the Bitcoin blockchain (parent) to mine on the Drivechain (child) without running a Drivechain full node, and miners are paid in BTC. Paul Sztorc proposed Bitcoin Improvement Proposals BIP 300 and 301 in 2017, allowing the creation of sidechains that are associated with the Bitcoin mainnet but remain independent. These sidechains can operate independently and have different rules and functions.
Adam Back expressed his appreciation for Drivechain as a form of side chain: Hats off to Paul Sztorc and his team for implementing and validating the Drivechain design. He also thinks Drivechains are cool and arguably more important or useful than Taproot. ” He also mentioned: “I think we will need a large-scale P2P side chain to allow the next billion users to benefit from non-seizable, censorship-resistant #bitcoin. Opcodes that support P2P side chains, such as LayerTwoLabs who do Drivechain , P2P Liquidium, Rootstock.”
It is worth mentioning that LayerTwoLabs was founded by Yale University economist Paul Sztorc and jointly developed by Bitcoin developers CryptAxe (2016-present) and Luke Dashjr (2012-present). Luke Dashjr is the Bitcoin Core developer who criticized Bitcoin Inscription a few days ago. He submitted a PR of BIP 300 to the Bitcoin Core Github code repository on August 22, and the Bitcoin Core community began to review Drivechain-related code.
LayerTwoLabs aims to promote the major Bitcoin upgrade proposals BIP 300 and BIP 301. Through DriveChain, Bitcoin will be highly scalable, private, and have a better UX experience. It will also support a variety of side chain development, aiming to decentralize the blockchain. Applications and other expanded functions of the blockchain are introduced into the Bitcoin ecosystem to achieve long-term and healthy development of Bitcoin. LayerTwoLabs has completed angel round financing of US$4 million and is currently undergoing the next round of financing.
Celebrities such as Robin Linus, the inventor of BitVM, and Fiatjaf, the founder of Nostr, and Anton Kumaigorodski mentioned above have also expressed varying degrees of support for Drivechain while putting down the Lightning Network.
Although it has received support from many Bitcoin OGs, it may still have a long way to go before it can pass the BIP proposal and achieve large-scale application on it. An optimistic estimate may be one or two years, a pessimistic estimate may be three or four years. Mike Yeung, investor and Asia head of Drivechain development team LayerTwoLabs, told BlockBeats. Launching Drivechain is undoubtedly a daunting task, but LayerTwo Labs has some plans and strategies to accelerate the adoption of Drivechain technology.
In Mike Yeungs view, from a technical perspective, the Lightning Network has some security vulnerabilities. Secondly, the Lightning Network is not beneficial to miners. In fact, the relationship between the Lightning Network and miners is not good. As for the possibility of the Lightning Network as a scaling tool, “I think it is actually impossible because it cannot implement smart contracts and what it can do is very limited. I don’t think the Lightning Network will completely fail, but its prospects are not optimistic. .”
Since 2017, countless investors, including individual investors, family offices, and venture capital have invested in the Lightning Network, and they cannot let their investments go to zero. Mike Yeung told BlockBeats. At the same time, some influential figures, including the former CEO of Twitter and the leadership of MicroStrategy, have closely tied their public images and PR strategies to the Lightning Networks brand. Due to their previous public support and the nature of the company, they cannot easily retract their previous remarks. This results in them having to continue to promote the advantages of the Lightning Network, even though they recognize that it has limitations and may not be the ultimate solution to Bitcoin’s scaling problems.
Try to break out
Blockstream main and sidechain research, while Taproot Assets focuses on developing Lightning Labs into a multi-asset network.
Taproot Assets is a Taproot-based CSV asset protocol for issuing assets on the Bitcoin blockchain. These assets can be traded instantly, in large quantities, and at low cost through the Lightning Network. At its core, Taproot Assets leverages the security and stability of Bitcoin with the speed, scalability and low cost of the Lightning Network.
This idea started in 2021, and the Lightning Labs team discovered that with the help of the Lightning Network, Bitcoin has been applied at the national level in El Salvador. This made Lightning Labs CEO Elizabeth Stark realize that people’s focus is gradually shifting from Bitcoin assets to Bitcoin’s currency network. So the team began to envision a multi-asset network aimed at expanding the global influence of Bitcoin and Lightning.
In September 2022, Lightning Labs released the initial Taro protocol code and announced $70 million in financing. Later, Taro changed its name to Taproot Assets due to accusations by blockchain startup Tari Labs that Taros name was similar to its own trademark and that it provided similar services.
The reason why Lightning Labs wants to design a brand new protocol is to avoid blockchain congestion, which is also the original intention of Taros design. It is tightly integrated with the Lightning Network, allowing assets to be stored and transferred in Lightning channels, enabling instant, low-fee transactions. On the other hand, it takes into account the “overwhelming” user demand for stablecoins and Lightning Labs’ goal of “Bitcoinizing the U.S. dollar.”
As Taproot Assets uses Bitcoin liquidity to route assets issued on the protocol, there will be even greater demand for Bitcoin on the Lightning Network. Thus, Bitcoin will circulate dollars, fiat currencies, and everything in between, thereby Bitcoinizing the dollar. The ultimate goal of Lightning Network is very clear: after the release of Taproot Assets, it will focus on developing into a multi-asset network.
Over the past few months of testnet development, early adopters and the team have been iterating, minting nearly 2,000 assets on the testnet, experimenting with stablecoins, collectibles, and the potential of RWA assets, and integrating their nodes with Universe Server Synchronization,The universe server is a repository that holds all the,information required for wallet initialization and downloading,the wallet state.
Taproot Assets is designed and developed by Olaoluwa Osuntokun, co-founder and CTO of Lightning Labs. Olaoluwa Osuntokun is one of the main developers of the Lightning Network client LND and a contributor to the Bitcoin client (BTCD). He is one of the few developers who has developed Lightning Network and Bitcoin clients and has a deep understanding of Bitcoin. .
Bitcoin Entrepreneurship
Unlike Ethereum, Bitcoin’s “rigidity” is fundamental to its legitimacy. This rigid culture emphasizes decentralization, freedom, security and privacy, but it also breeds a fair and diverse cultural and technical community.
If you have attended Bitcoin and Lightning Network conferences, it is easy to see the differences between the two communities.
This is Antoine Riards evaluation of the Bitcoin developer community in his blog. Bitcoin conferences (mainly Bitcoin Core) usually focus on in-depth technical discussions, emphasizing security and protocol engineering, and include experienced Internet users, various hackers, and civil libertarians. After experiencing numerous scams, they were naturally skeptical, but the intellectual debate remained open and honest.
In comparison, the Lightning Network crowd feels different. They are typically younger and more entrepreneurial, and discussions focus more on user experience and product design. The venue was vibrant, with a dizzying array of lightning apps for everyone to experience, and the influence of Silicon Valley was evident here. This can also be seen in the activities of the Lightning Torch Relay.
Compared with Bitcoin Core, Lightning Network pays more attention to innovation, practicality and community cooperation spirit. This cultural difference reflects the diversity and complexity of the Bitcoin ecosystem and is a source of its charm and vitality.
In the context of the new Bitcoin Ecosystem, inscriptions and memes are flying everywhere, but when the tide recedes, what is left of this ecosystem? The author believes that Bitcoin culture and more entrepreneurial communities and teams will become valuable assets for the development of the Bitcoin network.
Authors note: This article attempts to summarize the origin story and current impact of the Lightning Network. However, the history of the Lightning Network is much richer than I know. Putting them all in the structure of an article requires omitting many details and cannot reflect all The people, projects, and concepts that help make this technology possible. It is best to think of this article as a rough summary rather than a detailed historical and technical explanation. Thanks to everyone who provided information and other feedback.
References:
《THE HISTORY OF LIGHTNING: FROM BRAINSTORM TO BETA》，Aaron Van Wirdum；
《Bitcoin forks past》，BlockBeats；
《Why we may fail Lightning》，Antoine Riard；
《The joyful journey of building Bitcoin》，Antoine Riard；
《Lightning Labs joint venture: Taproot Assets can bring about “Bitcoin renaissance”》，BlockBeats；
