Bitfury Group conducted the first successful multi-hop transaction on the Lightning Network
Bitfury has been supporting and developing the implementation of the Lightning network for over a year. Today we will tell about the conduct of the first multi-hop transaction.
/ image Vadim Kurland CC
Lightning Network is a network of two-way payment channels that allow you to perform multiple transactions without writing each one to the blockchain, that is, exchanging cryptocurrency outside the blockchain.
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The network at the same time is distributed and decentralized, since it is built on the principle of a mesh network. This approach eliminates the problem of transaction censorship and violation of user privacy, centralization of the transaction processing market, and avoiding the presence of a single point of failure.
One of the defining features of LN is the ability to send currency to any member of the network through a chain of payment channels opened between users by building a route from the recipient to the sender.
The possibility of implementing this concept in practice was verified by Bitfury, having successfully carried out a multi-hop transaction, that is, a transaction that includes several more nodes, besides the two, which are the sender and recipient of the payment. In the test, three nodes participated in the transfer of cryptocurrency: the lightcoins switched from the first node to the third through the intermediary second through two previously open bidirectional payment LN channels.
Hashes of underlying transactions formed by the Bitfury team look as follows:
af3bc396cc6ea9fe10ae6c0b2691e40635f0286b356dcb962488ea6d9e15b0c8
87d25c3a6d895f5fff6892495e57814db58280e32eb4697428ac1e8c61a8a5c7
Routing was performed manually in the test, since only three nodes participated in the transaction, the “location” of which was known in advance. In the future, when the network grows to thousands of participants, this will require the Flare algorithm developed by Bitfury in conjunction with the Lightning Network team and presented in July 2016 (which we wrote about here ). The algorithm has already been tested by ACINQ.
The very concept of the Lightning Network in the near future will allow a huge number of routed microtransactions with little or no cost, which will seriously relieve the blockchains. In addition, LN will speed up payments: the time threshold will “fall” from 30 minutes to a few seconds. However, on the way to this it is necessary to overcome a number of difficulties.
In the context of bitcoin, the first and greatest difficulty remains the adoption of SegWit. This process lasts a long time, but is close to completion. The code for LN itself has already been written and is in the process of testing, eliminating bugs and finalizing the latest functions.
“However, the delay in the release of Segregated Witness blocks the real release of software. It also does not know how long it will take for the network to process a significant flow of transactions, says Vyacheslav Zhigulin from Bitfury. - In my opinion, it will take at least six months after the adoption of SegWit, before Bitcoin users see the real “cheap and fast” transactions. ”
The second difficulty is the proliferation of technology, since the new protocol will have to be introduced into existing user applications and ensure the operability of the network. And at the beginning of the spread of technology, the network may work poorly due to its low level of development (not all transactions can be completed, due to the lack of a suitable route).
However, after full implementation of the technology, small transactions will significantly expand the applicability of cryptocurrencies. In particular, they can start to be used in the retail industry - to pay for coffee, shopping in stores, per-second pricing of viewing content, etc. Now the fee for one transaction is about $ 3, which makes inappropriate transfers less than a certain amount.
Reddit users have already called the fact that the implementation of multi-hop transactions on the Lightning network is “extremely important” and noted that it is necessary to implement this technology as soon as possible into the main cryptocurrency wallets and blockchains. And work on the first user applications is already being done by a large number of developers, including Blockstream, ACINQ, Lightning Labs, MIT DCI, and Bitfury.
Additional reading:
/ image Vadim Kurland CC
Lightning Network is a network of two-way payment channels that allow you to perform multiple transactions without writing each one to the blockchain, that is, exchanging cryptocurrency outside the blockchain.
')
The network at the same time is distributed and decentralized, since it is built on the principle of a mesh network. This approach eliminates the problem of transaction censorship and violation of user privacy, centralization of the transaction processing market, and avoiding the presence of a single point of failure.
One of the defining features of LN is the ability to send currency to any member of the network through a chain of payment channels opened between users by building a route from the recipient to the sender.
The possibility of implementing this concept in practice was verified by Bitfury, having successfully carried out a multi-hop transaction, that is, a transaction that includes several more nodes, besides the two, which are the sender and recipient of the payment. In the test, three nodes participated in the transfer of cryptocurrency: the lightcoins switched from the first node to the third through the intermediary second through two previously open bidirectional payment LN channels.
Hashes of underlying transactions formed by the Bitfury team look as follows:
af3bc396cc6ea9fe10ae6c0b2691e40635f0286b356dcb962488ea6d9e15b0c8
87d25c3a6d895f5fff6892495e57814db58280e32eb4697428ac1e8c61a8a5c7
Routing was performed manually in the test, since only three nodes participated in the transaction, the “location” of which was known in advance. In the future, when the network grows to thousands of participants, this will require the Flare algorithm developed by Bitfury in conjunction with the Lightning Network team and presented in July 2016 (which we wrote about here ). The algorithm has already been tested by ACINQ.
The very concept of the Lightning Network in the near future will allow a huge number of routed microtransactions with little or no cost, which will seriously relieve the blockchains. In addition, LN will speed up payments: the time threshold will “fall” from 30 minutes to a few seconds. However, on the way to this it is necessary to overcome a number of difficulties.
In the context of bitcoin, the first and greatest difficulty remains the adoption of SegWit. This process lasts a long time, but is close to completion. The code for LN itself has already been written and is in the process of testing, eliminating bugs and finalizing the latest functions.
“However, the delay in the release of Segregated Witness blocks the real release of software. It also does not know how long it will take for the network to process a significant flow of transactions, says Vyacheslav Zhigulin from Bitfury. - In my opinion, it will take at least six months after the adoption of SegWit, before Bitcoin users see the real “cheap and fast” transactions. ”
The second difficulty is the proliferation of technology, since the new protocol will have to be introduced into existing user applications and ensure the operability of the network. And at the beginning of the spread of technology, the network may work poorly due to its low level of development (not all transactions can be completed, due to the lack of a suitable route).
However, after full implementation of the technology, small transactions will significantly expand the applicability of cryptocurrencies. In particular, they can start to be used in the retail industry - to pay for coffee, shopping in stores, per-second pricing of viewing content, etc. Now the fee for one transaction is about $ 3, which makes inappropriate transfers less than a certain amount.
Reddit users have already called the fact that the implementation of multi-hop transactions on the Lightning network is “extremely important” and noted that it is necessary to implement this technology as soon as possible into the main cryptocurrency wallets and blockchains. And work on the first user applications is already being done by a large number of developers, including Blockstream, ACINQ, Lightning Labs, MIT DCI, and Bitfury.
Additional reading:
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/332436/
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