Experience the foolish (true) lightning network mobile wallet released by Lightning Labs

Today, lightning network developer Lightning Labs released an alpha version of the iOS and Android mobile lightning network wallet application, plus its previously released three desktop wallets, Lightning Labs supports a total of five operating systems.

As a two-tier extension technology, Lightning Network aims to reduce the burden of the Bitcoin main chain by bringing high-frequency low-value transactions from the chain to the chain. It is committed to providing almost instant and free transactions.

So far, the performance of the lightning network can only be regarded as a law-abiding, it experienced a lot of exposure in the first half of 2019, and this is due to the lightning network torch, even the founder and CEO of Twitter are lightning The network is full of praise.

However, the reality that the early lightning network was not easy to use has made this technology difficult to be widely used.

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In this regard, Lightning Labs team Lightning Labs team is clearly aware of this, and its launch application is designed to make it as easy as possible for new users who are not good at technology to use Lightning Network.

Unmanaged wallet using LND

Like the previous desktop wallet, this mobile app uses Lightning Labs' own LND, which integrates a full-featured lightning network node. This is the same LND codebase that most lightning networks operate today. For future versions, Lightning Labs still needs to do a lot of work to improve the stability and performance of the application.

In general, this mobile app uses two core technologies, the first one is Neutrino , a light client specification that allows unmanaged Lightning Network Wallet to verify bitcoin with improved privacy and minimal trust. Trading without having to synchronize the entire Bitcoin blockchain (about 225 GB). Instead, the user only has to wait a few minutes to verify the tens of megabytes of block header data files.

The second core technology is Autopilot , which guides users into part of the Lightning Network by connecting new users to reliable routing nodes to select a channel.

For specific information about these two technologies, you can find out here:

Https://blog.lightning.engineering/announcement/2019/04/23/mainnet-app.html

Use experience

The author downloaded the iOS version of the app from the official link. After opening the app, I jumped out 24 mnemonics. If you want to use this wallet, then you should keep these words safely, you can't copy them, you can't mess with them. order.

Before experiencing the lightning network, we need to put a small amount of bitcoin in the wallet. For example, the author turned around about 80,000 Cong, which is within the range of 5-20 USD recommended by the official. (Because the current lightning network is still in the early stages of development, large amounts of storage are not recommended)

After synchronizing the data files, we can use this application to conduct transaction testing with others. We can visit https://yalls.org/, https://ln.pizza and other sites that support Lightning Network. Here I choose The content site at https://yalls.org/:

We can see that if we want to continue reading this article, we will need to pay about $0.01. After applying the scan payment and waiting for a few seconds (delay time), the payment is completed, and then I open it. What you want to visit:

Slightly sloppy, fortunately the cost of payment is very low, only 150 Sat.

Experience summary

From the experience, this true lightning network wallet is basically a fool-like operation, and it is close to the experience with our commonly used hosted wallet (except for some delay time).

It can be said that this mobile lightning network wallet can accelerate the application of lightning network well, but due to the few other applications and businesses currently receiving lightning network, its current experience is still slightly unsatisfactory. I hope that with the increasing number of people using such wallets (when they make a small amount of money on the routing nodes), the lightning network will usher in a real explosive growth.

Reference: https://blog.lightning.engineering/announcement/2019/06/19/mobile-app.html

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