João Almeida, a software engineer from Portugal, has given life to 'Poketoshi', an emulator that gives users the chance to play the famous Pokémon of the Nintendo platform in the Lightning Network (LN) protocol. The news was announced through an article published by The Next Web on June 19.
Lightning Network is a solution that aims to optimize the failures of scalability that Bitcoin's blockchain has, opening payment channels between users that keep most of the transactions out of the chain, resorting to the underlying chain of blocks only to record the net results .
Poketoshi uses LN along with Twitch, a streaming platform for games that allows users to interact with the emulator within an online chat conference, under the name "Twitch Plays Pokémon".
Poketoshi uses a virtual supervisor enabled by Lightning Network for users to enter their own game commands for which they are charged 10 satoshis each.
The platform for making these payments is called OpenNode and acts as a Bitcoin payment processor that is also available for use with the LN protocol. This means that the game is a playful way to test the ambition of the Lightning protocol to facilitate instant BTC payments outside the chain at high volume.
As pointed out by The Next Web in its post, several Poketoshi users are already making ironic references to the well-known rivalry between Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and the defenders of LN. One of these references argues that hard fork is a better response to the Bitcoin scalability problem than the Lightning Network protocol itself.
According to CoinTelegraph, in February of this year, Laszlo Hanyecz, the man who completed the first BTC transaction documented for a physical item in 2010 paying 10,000 BTC for two pizzas, repeated his historical purchase with Lightning Network, with the warning that he had to get to his friend in London to "outsource" the delivery of pizza to a local business to pay with LN, since the "Pizza / Bitcoin exchange software" was not yet available.
In March of this year, the protocol of the original blockchain advanced a lot towards general adoption after seeing the implementation of its main product. After that, several tools mostly oriented to the user have arrived through private developers.
The first mobile wallet for users created for Lightning Network was launched on April 4 of this year.
Beyond all this, the arrival of poketoshi implies the fact that more and more things are interacting with blockchain, even something like a videogame is enough to think that the chain blocks will serve to create many things.
Those who compare Internet with blockchain, are the largest advocates of this thesis, and if we take into account the number of government and banking entities that have highlighted the potential of technology, it is even easier to agree with this position.
Source: CoinTelegraph