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All eyes are on the bullish price of bitcoin at the moment. Behind the scenes, however, developers are tinkering to build the infrastructure that many hope will make the Bitcoin system more accessible to more people.
Last week, tech startup Bitcoin Blockstream released its latest major version of c-lightning, its implementation of the Lightning network. The release is dubbed “Rat Poison Squared on Steroids,” jokingly referencing Warren Buffet’s comment that Bitcoin is “rat poison squared” and, in his opinion, investors would be burned if they put their money into it.
Of course, the c-lightning developers probably don’t believe Bitcoin is “rat poison”, as they are working full time to scale bitcoin payments. The Lightning Network is pitched as the future of Bitcoin because it introduces faster and cheaper payments and scales the network so that it can support many, many more users than it currently can support without slowing it down.
Read more: What is the Bitcoin Lightning Network?
With this release, Bitcoin’s Lightning Network gradually continues to make progress. Here’s a dive into the main pieces of the latest version.
Sending MPP for more reliable payments
Multipart Payments (MPP) is a feature that will improve the Lightning Network user experience (UX). Payments sometimes fail when the software cannot find a path for the user. This is particularly likely to occur when payments are greater; Large payments require an adequate amount of liquidity in all channels between the sender node and the recipient node. If there is not enough liquidity to support the transfer of the payment, the payment will fail.
MPP effectively divides payments into smaller parts so that they are easier to send across the network, making payments more reliable.
Read More: ‘Multi-Party’ Payments Could Bring More Bitcoin to Lightning Network
“The most obvious feature is that we can now pay in multipart payments,” Blockstream Lightning engineer Rusty Russell told CoinDesk.
Lightning C was able to do this receive MPP payments since last year, “but Christian [Decker, Blockstream engineer] I finally managed to implement the send side, ”Russell said.
This is a much larger effort to upgrade Lightning’s UX to hopefully attract more users. MPP was discussed by developers at a Lightning developer summit in 2018 in Adelaide, Australia.
Watchtowers fight fraud
Watchtowers is an anti-fraud component of the Lightning Network which is at the beginning of its creation. A watchtower “watches” a user’s bitcoin in the Lightning Network to make sure it’s safe. If someone tries to cheat, the watchtower detects the infringement and responds by penalizing the offending user.
Read more: Bitcoin Lightning Fraud? Laolu is building a “watchtower” to fight it
C-lightning has made changes to make it easier for watchtowers to attach to c-lightning. Blockstream engineer Christian Decker “has added enough information to allow a plugin to easily support a watchtower,” Russell told CoinDesk. “We tell him exactly which transaction he should post if the previous (cheating) transaction appears.”
Like plug-ins in other software, such as the Google Chrome browser or a music creation program, a plug-in in c-lightning adds extra functionality to the c-lightning node.
Russell noted that the Eye of Satoshi lightning watchtower is already using this new feature.
Coin Tracking for Taxes
C-lightning laid the foundation for a tool to track “all” a user’s coin movements, Russell told CoinDesk.
This could come in handy for anyone worried about tracking their Lightning Coins during tax season so they can understand what they owe the IRS.
Read more: Crypto Taxes: Still confusing after all these years
This underlying tracing work has been added to this release. The next step is to make this functionality available to users. Neigut is “putting the finishing touches” on a plug-in that “records everything your accountant will want to know about where your money is coming from and where,” Russell said.
“It looks like he’s looking forward to the next fiscal year, so he can use it angrily :),” he added.
Other changes
While these are some of the most significant changes, there are many others.
C-lightning now supports sending keysend transactions, which offers a new way to tip others with Lightning payments. And Russell said the developer team has “redesigned everything” to support a new bitcoin transaction format called PSBT (partially signed bitcoin transactions), which facilitates transactions with hardware wallets, a secure method of storing bitcoin as the device remains disconnected. from the network.
Read the release notes for more details.
