Hi everyone. This article will cover LND ("Lightning Network Daemon"), the premier desktop app for Bitcoin's Lightning Network. The Lightning Network is an upcoming system allowing for near zero-fee Bitcoin transactions and peer-to-peer payment channels on the Bitcoin network.
LND is now available for public teta testing, and can be downloaded here. Let's get started!
What's the Lightning Network?
The Lightning Network is an extension to the Bitcoin blockchain. The current model utilizes 100% blockchain transactions, meaning:
- every transaction gets pushed publicly from your node/computer to a miner
- every transaction needs to get confirmed by a miner to be verified/accepted
- transaction confirmation requires paying fees, which may sometimes be large
- all transactions are stored on the transparent distributed ledger (blockchain)
The current model is fully trustless and secure, yet it can incur large fees for some users and may not be as private as users want.
Lightning Network to the Rescue
The Lightning Network fixes this by adding onto Bitcoin. It's important to note that the Lightning Network works on top of Bitcoin, and is not a fork away from Bitcoin.
The LN uses payment channels, which are peer-to-peer network connections, to transmit transactions. For most transactions sent through a peer-to-peer payment channel, the transaction fee needed is zero.
Only if one of the parties wants to close the payment channel would they transmit their channel balance to the blockchain. Once their channel balance is transmitted to the blockchain, it's publicly verified.
The LN is still trustless, yet allows for low-fee quick-confirmation transactions. I highly recommend reading my in-depth summary of the Lightning Network here.
The LND Desktop App
Lightning Network Daemon (abbreviated LND), is an app currently being built enabling the Lightning Network on Bitcoin.
The app is completely open-source, as the developers have maintained a goal of publicity and transparency. The source code is available in a repository here.
Let's look at some of the technical details for the app.
Technical Details
The app is built in Go, an innovative programming language created at Google. The app relies on Neutrino, an open-source operating mode for Bitcoin. Neutrino allows for increased privacy and more flexibility for light clients. The fact that LND relies on a light client means that the barrier to enter into the Lightning Network is very small.
LND fully supports SegWit, or Segregated Witness, a protocol recently implemented in the Bitcoin Core blockchain. Users will be able to open channels and transact with SegWit addresses, which according to LND's blog post, look like this: tb1q62cgd0u7h654rpu4fm9y4fe47x5khesyd9k2q9
However, LND can still work with non-segwit addresses, and some transaction types will not require SegWit usage.
Lastly, LND is a "full-fledged wallet." This means that it also supports non-lightning-network (on-chain) transactions that are fully on the blockchain.
Information and Links
For more information about LND, I highly recommend reading the below links.
- Official LND Blog Post - This is LND's blog post announcing the public beta testing; a must-read if you want to learn how the beta will work.
- LND Source Code - This link takes you to the LND source code, hosted on Github.
- Lightning Labs Website - This is a link to the website of Lightning Labs, the San Francisco company helping create LND, Neutrino, and the Lightning Network layer for Bitcoin.
If things work out, the Lightning Network could provide radical improvements to Bitcoin, and lower the entry barrier even further to join the cryptocurrency revolution.
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