Why Lightning Network End-to-End Micropayment Transaction Test Is Important for Bitcoin

Blockstream’s end-to-end Lightning Network micropayment transaction test showed the bitcoin community that it is possible to execute transactions on a public blockchain, Blockstream developer Christian Decker said of the significance of the experiment.

Decker said:

“This test uncovered some bugs in the Lightning Network that were quickly fixed, and proved that payments on a public blockchain are indeed feasible.”

As previously reported, Blockstream has announced that they have successfully sent the first end-to-end transaction to another party on the Lightning Network, a process that involves invoicing Bitcoin and routing the payment through multiple nodes.

To test the upcoming prototype — and in a sign that the Lightning Network is moving from the conceptual stage to implementation — the Blockstream team set up a web server to create an invoice for a test bitcoin payment on the Lightning Network, asking for a price for a picture of an ASCII cat.

Real blockchain testing

Decker said in an email:

“This is the first time a Lightning Network implementation has been tested on a real blockchain. We have implemented it, so far in a controlled local Regtest network environment, and tested it on the public test network. It was an end-to-end test where we had a fictional supplier, played by Rusty, and a buyer, played by me, go through the process of invoicing, executing the transfer and issuing the purchased item.”

He said the test was a big step toward deploying and activating the Lightning Network, and that the team is planning to release version 0.5 soon. This will likely be the first version that users will be able to test themselves, and hopefully everyone will be able to set up little shops on the test network, like the funny cat server that the Blockstream team built, to gather experience with the Lightning Network.

Decker also said:

“We will be having a small Lightning implementer meeting after the Scaling Bitcoin conference this weekend to discuss the Lightning protocol, and we hope to finalize the details of a standardized protocol that will allow interoperability among Lightning implementations. These privacy changes will likely be implemented in the 0.6 release, so they may not add many new user-visible features.”

Open Code

He also explained that in order to implement the Lightning Network on the Bitcoin mainnet, we need to wait for Segregated Witness to be activated - the last hurdle for the Lightning Network to actually be implemented - and hope to gain enough operational experience on the test network before then, so that we can then quickly deploy it to the mainnet.

As with many other Lightning Network implementations, code development for this one is happening in the open, so anyone can participate on Github.