Author: Christian Decker 2016-10-05 16:00:18
Published on: 2016-10-05T16:00:18+00:00
Blockstream developers Rusty Russell and Dr. Christian Decker have successfully demonstrated an end-to-end test of a lightning micropayment network using the v0.5 C lightning prototype. Rusty Russell wrote about the demonstration on Blockstream's blog, explaining that to test the impending prototype, they set up a web server to create invoices for test bitcoin payments over the lightning network, and in return offered to send an ASCII cat picture. Dr. Decker purchased the feline picture using 0.01 test bitcoin to open a lightning channel with the server which was mined in a test block. After paying the invoice with a 100 satoshi transfer, he accessed the link to find his cat picture, discovering it was an ASCII picture, featuring two cats. He promptly opened another node, connected to the first node, and bought a second copy of the cat picture by routing through the previous node. The demonstration included invoicing, multi-hop payment, and item delivery. It is very different from Acinq's recent simulation of a lightning routing algorithm called Flare. Rusty found a few bugs in corner cases and hit some known FIXMEs, but also made lightningd more robust against misconfiguration. The team plans to create libraries to allow web developers to construct their own cat picture stores. A video of the demonstration has been provided on asciinema.org.
Updated on: 2023-05-24T00:34:59.993588+00:00