The lightning network mainnet has become increasingly widely used and well funded recently, and facilitates almost instant payments of cryptocurrency, with much lower fees than onchain transactions. Meanwhile the price of bitcoin has dropped spectacularly from its December 2017 peak. This huge drop in price, as forecast by many in the traditional banking sector, may have resulted in an abandonment of the cryptocurrency from short term speculators. The lightning network, along with other developments, have always looked to address bitcoin’s most notable flaws and make it look like a worthy future contender to the established banking systems as a means of transfer of funds between not just human users, but in the age of the internet of things, machines.
The LND implementation is still largely immature and still has a long way to go before it could be described as stable, but is constantly evolving and improving rapidly as new features are added and bugs are fixed. A number of mobile apps have been designed and developed to enable users to send and receive lightning payments by connecting to lightning network nodes. One of the most visually impressive apps is called Zap, and it was interesting to set up a lightning network node and see how easy it is to send payments using Zap.
Zap is still at alpha stage, needs to be downloaded by means of TestFlight, and the developers fully acknowledge that it is aimed mainly at technical users at this stage. The need to set up a node, or connect it to one, can make it difficult to use at present. Ultimately the aim is to embed a LND client called Neutrino in to the app itself, which along with some UI optimisation for non technical users should enable it to reach a much wider audience.
The node was simply hosted on a low specification VPS and the documentation provided by the Zap team made this easy to set up using Docker and the command line. It took a while to manually connect to enough channels to send payments, as the autopilot feature didn’t seem to work. Following funding the node with some testnet bitcoins, several days later it was satisfying to see testnet payments to websites like Yalls, HTLC.me and Starblocks working well and almost instantly. The camera based QR code features worked well.
Entering the age of 5g and the users expectation of instantaneous delivery of requested internet content, the relatively long timescales for on-chain bitcoin transactions always felt like a bad user experience. Not only that but it could hinder the retail experience as payment has to be verified before the product can be released and the price could change during the transaction.
There are still major issues which need to be addressed with routing, and this was apparent early on with only a few channels opened and payments failed. Once that is fixed and stable the lightning network certainly seems to solve the problem of delayed transactions. With such a highly skilled and dedicated community of people working on not just the underlying lightning network protocol but mobile apps like Zap, the future of bitcoin looks very promising.