Lightning b Thunder: the future of Bitcoin as a payment network

Well-known problem associated with the shipment of several bitcoins from one wallet to another, is the speed with which this occurs. At times, the entire translation process, from the formation of the transaction and ending her confirmation in blokcheyne takes 10 to 15 minutes or more.

So much time is spent at the Bitcoin ecosystem of servers to distribute the network nodes information about the transaction. Thus, when sending even a tiny amount of bitcoins, bitcoin use all nodes.

The beauty of Bitcoin is that it allows you to make ideal from a security point of view, the transaction does not cycling with no centralized guarantors, intermediaries, such as banks. In terms of the mechanics of the transaction, such a scheme is scalable and is difficult to fairly costly. For this reason, Bitcoin is still in a stage of relative infancy, because they do not have the ability to scale up to the level of payment networks like Mastercard or Visa.

Lightning и Thunder

Lightning Network is designed to solve this problem. It is designed so that you can send bitcoins without having to trust the other participants in the network, offloading the main blokcheyn Bitcoin. Every payment made by using addresses with multipodpisyu is instantaneous and final.

speed and scalability issues Bitcoin been described in detail and documented. Joseph Poon and Thaddeus Dry (Thaddeus Dryja) are the authors of Lightning network concept. Their proposal - to create an alternative Bitcoin network, which would take over the function of registration of transactions in seconds by using smart contracts, not loading with the main blokcheyn Bitcoin.

Thunder - the first known analogue Lightning network. Blockchain.info now started work in Thunder test mode. Third-party companies now can learn the code, offering Thunder-wallets, to interact with the network, or to develop their own fork. Thunder is also able to work with a variety of other cryptocurrency.

While he is not available to end users purses Bockchain.info, but in the community already hovering idea of ​​its potential utility in accelerating the payment transaction on the basis of this and other platforms purses.

Interview with Matt Dzherratchem (Mats Jerratsch)

Not so long ago to Blockchain.info team he joined Mats Dzherratch, whose responsibilities include the coordination of the integration of Lightning and Thunder networks. His interest in Bitcoin was born in the troubled period for the global community of crypto currency:

"I started trading algorithms at a time when Mt. Gox suspended trading. Then, reading the Lightning network concept, I was deep in the area of smart contracts ".

Dzherratch offers its concise definition of what is Lightning network:

Lightning is a payment network, where payments before their placement in blokcheyne Bitcoin is transmitted by a plurality of nodes, without any intermediary risks. The user is not limited in the number of transactions. This allows you to quickly and with minimal cost to make payments.

How does it work? "Each party payment channel gives the opponent the promise of the next payment," - says Mats. "Smart contract guarantees the fulfillment of the obligation only if the receiving party accepts the payment. Then all the nodes one by one release delivery. Thunder integrates all these mechanisms and builds on top of its platform, adding functionality to search for peers and routes between them. "

Transactions Thunder Bitcoin can turn into 'high-speed train', allowing up to 100 000 transactions per second. Compared with Visa, capable of processing up to 56,000 transactions per second, this capacity greatly improves the original 7 transactions per second, laid Satoshi.

It is also important to note that the use of Thunder as a whole will reduce commission costs on the transaction. Simple division of the size of commissions on the increased number of transactions give us a scenario where Bitcoin payments are much cheaper.

By eliminating many of the restrictions of the original Bitcoin protocol, the Thunder took the heir to the old means of payment processing such as Visa.

Dzherratch says that at the moment there are many unresolved challenges and barriers that hinder the pace of development of the Thunder.

"It is difficult to create a financial software. Financial decentralized networks even more difficult, as any mistake can be used by persons unknown for pumping money from the system. Such software should be of very high quality, while being modular, for a variety of application possibilities. For widespread adoption, we need to rewrite all the software to be able to integrate this new form of payment. This includes purses, and payment service providers. We need a lot of infrastructure. In addition, you want to hide from the user the complexity of the internal structure, which is a volume problem. "

Despite all these difficulties, Dzherratch remains optimistic about the future of Lightning and Thunder, and their ability to make Bitcoin protocol more attractive.

"Maybe I'm too optimistic, but I believe that the world is ripe for transition to more advanced financial cooperation protocols. Thus, the key factor in making the technology accessible to the general public, which include not only the users having technical expertise. It will be interesting to see how quickly other financial industry service providers adapt this technology. "