Sometimes Satoshi’s enigmatic absence makes us feel that Bitcoin is an offering of nature, something that emerged from itself and was left on our doorstep, like an orphan in a cybernetic basket. An organism collected by other disembodied pseudonyms, digital personalities only existing on GitHub, Twitter, Reddit or BitcoinTalk. But there is life behind bitcointhere are flesh and blood people devoting their time and effort to building the infrastructure of freer money for humanity.
Bitcoin seems to have a life of its own because it is open and decentralized. Anyone, from the comfort of their home, can participate in the development of this organization and contribute their knowledge without having to be hired by a company or ask anyone for permission. Such is the wonder of free software.
But our very social nature induces us to face-to-face meetings, no matter how much the political agendas want us confined to our homes and afraid of each other. After more than two years without physical meetings to develop the application layer on Bitcoin, the last weekend of February the Lightning Hackday Istanbul, organized by Fulmo.
From Friday to Sunday, bitcoiners from around the world woke up in ancient Constantinople to the sound of the adhan or call to prayer – no longer recited by the muezzin from the minarets, but played on loudspeakers from the mosques – to share their knowledge and develop applications on Lightning, the network of Bitcoin payment channels.
I’m not lying to you: it’s not an event for everyone. High technical knowledge of Bitcoin and Lightning is required to pulp presentations. But if you are a developer and currently have a Bitcoin-related project on your hands, this is the best place to be. The spirit of open source runs throughout the space. No one suspiciously hides the results of their work; on the contrary, everyone spreads it generously, inviting anyone to contribute and offering it to anyone who wants to replicate it and use it as a basis for their own project.
Lightning, more than lightning, an electrical storm
The development of Bitcoin occurs asynchronously. At the very moment you are reading this there are hundreds or thousands of people writing code, thinking or discussing how to improve the network without us being aware of it. Keeping up with all the advances in space is demanding. However, in places like the Lightning Hackday Istanbul we can have one approach to the state of the art in development and even participate.
Surely you have seen the points of sale to receive bitcoin without internet that we spread in CriptoNoticias, but it is very different to be able to configure it live with the support of its creator, Ben Arc, from LNBits. Or also being able to see how easily a vending machine can be configured to receive payments via Lightning, also without an Internet connection.
But to be able to pay for your favorite soft drink at the vending machine, or perhaps pay for a kebab through the point of sale of a store in the Ottoman capital, you first need something indispensable: bitcoin. That’s what both the Bleskomat ATMs and the @21isenough Lightning ATM were for. Both you can build yourself and make it easy to change from fiat currencies to satoshis.
Imagine how useful it would be to have one of these at the airports, to get rid of that change that you had left over at the end of your vacation and that is not worth changing in some exchange due to the commissions. Better trade it for some precious sats lightning fast with one of these
And if you are one of those who are not yet very accustomed to bitcoin price variations and you prefer the slow but sure depreciation of fiat currencies, the team at Synonyms presented its progress for sending the stablecoin Tether (USDT) in Lightning, through the protocol OMNIBolt.
But this is not the only alternative that is being investigated to have the US currency on the Lightning network. From Galoy, creators of the Bitcoin Beach Wallet of El Salvador, they are exploring the issuance of synthetic dollars through Discrete Log Contracts by Difference (DLCFD), a new proposal that would use the OkX derivatives market.
This initiative arises from the difficulty that Galoy has observed among its new users to understand the value proposition of BTC as an asset, but that they can still benefit from the opening of the Bitcoin protocol and the speed of the Lightning network, using the dollar as a unit. of account. From the perspective of some, fiat money is still necessary for the transition to a bitcoinized economy.
We know that the Lightning Network is still in its infancy. There is a lot of work to be done to improve your efficiency and privacy. Great minds like René Pickhardt, co-author of Master Lightning, presented the results of their investigations for payments through multiple routes (multi-path payments) optimized for the highest probability of success, which greatly improve the usability of the network. In turn, the irreverent popularizer Giacomo Zucco defended Lightning’s argument as a privacy improvement for Bitcoin transactions, while admitting its current weaknesses.
Going over the various research and developments going on in the Lightning Network right now would leave us with an endless list. As Carla Kirk-Cohen of Lightning Labs illustrated in her presentation, the Lightning ecosystem today is made up of wallets, node managers, liquidity providers, merchant payment solutions, podcasting 2.0 apps, instant messaging services, and more. much more.
This dizzying growth of infrastructure, tools and applications on the second layer protocol for Bitcoin demonstrates the enormous vitality that exists in this space. It also shows an eagerness to demystify the narrative that BTC is too slow or too expensive for micropayments and should only be used as a collectible, which goes against its potential for build circular economies parallel to the flawed fiat system.
Orhan Pamuk, a Turkish novelist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, used to speak of Istanbul as a melancholy city with the memory of fallen empires everywhere. With events like Hackday of Fulmo, that cultural and commercial hinge between Asia and Europe, with its depreciated Lira due to inflation, is also being part of the story of the fall of the fiat order.
Also from Turkey, as in perhaps all the countries of the world today, there are humans who, without any coordination and moved by their own interests and curiosity, lay new bricks for that civilizing monument that is Bitcoin and to unveil all the possibilities of Lightning network.