Andreas M. Antonopoulos - Mastering the Lightning Network: A Second Layer Blockchain Protocol for Instant Bitcoin Payments

Andreas M. Antonopoulos

by Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Olaoluwa Osuntokun, and Ren Pickhardt

Copyright 2022 aantonop Books LLC, Ren Pickhardt, and uuddlrlrbasLLC. All rights reserved.

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ISBN-13: 978-1492054863

ISBN-10: 1492054860

Andreas M. Antonopoulos is a best-selling author, speaker, educator,and highly sought after expert in Bitcoin and open blockchaintechnologies. He is known for making complex subjects easy to understandand highlighting both the positive and negative impacts thesetechnologies can have on our global societies.

Andreas has written two more best-selling technical books forprogrammers with OReilly Media, Mastering Bitcoin and MasteringEthereum. He has also published The Internet of Money series ofbooks, which focus on the social, political, and economic importance andimplications of these technologies. Andreas produces free educationalcontent on his YouTube channel weekly and teaches virtual workshops onhis website. Learn more at aantonop.com.

Olaoluwa Osuntokun is the cofounder and CTO of Lightning Labs, andalso the lead developer of lnd, one of the main implementations ofLightning. He received his BS and MS in Computer Science from UCSB andwas a member of the Forbes 30 Under 30 class of 2019. During hisgraduate studies he focused on the field of applied cryptography,specifically encrypted search. He has been an active Bitcoin developerfor over five years, and is an author of several Bitcoin ImprovementProposals (BIP-157 and 158). These days, his primary focus lies inbuilding, designing, and evolving private, scalable off-chain blockchainprotocols, such as Lightning.

Ren Pickhardt is a trained mathematician and data science consultantwho uses his statistical knowledge to do research with NTNU aboutpathfinding, privacy, reliability of payments, and service-levelagreements of the Lightning Network. Ren maintains a technical anddeveloper-oriented YouTubechannel about the Lightning Network and has answered roughly half ofthe questions about the Lightning Network on the Bitcoin Stack Exchange,making him the go-to point for almost all new developers who want tojoin the space. Ren has held numerous workshops about the LightningNetwork in public and private, including teaching students of the 2019Chaincode Labs residency together with other core Lightning developers.

The Lightning Network (LN) is a second layer peer-to-peer network that allows us to make Bitcoin payments "off-chain," meaning without committing them as transactions to the Bitcoin blockchain.

The Lightning Network gives us Bitcoin payments that are secure, cheap, fast, and much more private, even for very small payments.

Building on the idea of payment channels, first proposed by Bitcoins inventor Satoshi Nakamoto, the Lightning Network is a routed network of payment channels where payments "hop" across a path of payment channels from the sender to the recipient.

The initial idea of the Lightning Network was proposed in 2015 in the groundbreaking paper "The Bitcoin Lightning Network: Scalable Off-Chain Instant Payments," by Joseph Poon and Thaddeus Dryja. By 2017, there was a "test" Lightning Network running on the internet, as different groups built compatible implementations and coordinated to set some interoperability standards. In 2018, the Lightning Network went "live" and payments started flowing.

In 2019, Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Olaoluwa Osuntokun, and Ren Pickhardt agreed to collaborate to write this book. It appears we have been successful!

This book is mostly intended for technical readers with an understanding of the fundamentals of Bitcoin and other open blockchains.

The following typographical conventions are used in this book:

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The examples are illustrated in Go, C++, Python, and using the command line of a Unix-like operating system. All code snippets are available in the GitHub repository under the code subdirectory. Fork the book code, try the code examples, or submit corrections via GitHub.