https://satoshis.place/ describes itself as:
a Lightning Network ⚡ powered online collaborative artboard. Inspired by Reddit Place, and the Million Dollar Homepage.
These are the features of the game:
- There are 1 million pixels on the canvas.
- Each pixel costs 1 satoshi to paint.
- Pixels can be painted over indefinitely.
To let the world know about the Hive fork (the legitimate continuation of the Steem blockchain following its demise), I wrote "Hive is Alive":
This drawing consisted of 364 pixels. Thus it cost 364 satoshis to submit. This equals ₿0.00000364, equivalent at time of sending to 2 or 3 US cents.
Usually, this type of micropayment wouldn't make sense on Bitcoin, because transaction fees would exceed the amount of value sent. However, Lightning Network changes that. I sent the transaction for a fee of 2 satoshis using the Phoenix Lightning Wallet.
Phoenix, currently available on Android only, is an open source wallet that makes using Lightning incredible easy and intuitive. And since it's non-custodial, many of the trust-minimizing properties of Bitcoin remain.
If you haven't tried Lightning Network, now is the time. Phoenix is intuitive enough to use that it could easily replace Venmo or Paypal for payments between users with cryptocurrency.
Compared to on-chain Bitcoin transactions, Lightning Network transactions have the following advantages:
- cheaper transaction fees
- immediacy
- better privacy
Lightning Network essentially enables all the early selling points of Bitcoin that turned out to be technically infeasible on-chain. The main downside is that participation requires periodically monitoring the network. However, this inconvenience can be solved with minimal trust of third-parties to monitor the network on your behalf.
Hive on! Stay alive.