Blockstream engineers Paul “Rusty” Russell and Dr. Christian Decker completed their first lightning transaction on Bitcoin’s testnet this week. The test transaction was made using the latest version of the Blockstream’s lightning prototype software, lightningd 0.5 and consisted of a digital purchase from a web-store. Speaking to Bitcoin Magazine Decker said: “This is a big milestone for us. It’s the first time we have a channel setup on a real blockchain, with real latencies and block rates, and it’s the first multi-hop transaction, where a payment for a digital good routes from one node to another through a third node.” Making the Transaction The highly anticipated lightning network is a proposed second-layer protocol to be rolled out on top of Bitcoin’s blockchain. Cleverly utilizing Bitcoin’s programmable elements (e.g., multi-signature and timelock) lightning users should be able to make a virtually unlimited number of off-chain transactions at low cost, potentially boosting Bitcoin’s micropayment-ability and overall scalability. Several teams are currently working on different implementations of lightning software. Only last week, BitFury , Lightning Labs and ACINQ announced a successful test of proposed lightning routing system Flare , whereas a Lightning Labs developer had previously completed lightning transactions to himself. Blockchain , meanwhile, made lightning-style transactions on the alpha version of their Thunder network — though these are not yet trustless or secure. Blockstream’s team is now the first to have conducted a successful and trustless transaction between two developers on Bitcoin’s testnet, which served as a “real” payment. “We’ve spent over a year working on different parts of the protocol, and from a technical perspective, simply sewing them together isn’t challenging,” Russell explained. “But it’s easy for us geeks to miss the forest for the trees. For this transaction, I acted as an actual vendor, and Christian made an actual […]
