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A Developer's Guide to Ethereum
book

A Developer's Guide to Ethereum

by Bruno Skvorc, Mateja Kendel, David Attard, Mislav Javor, Tonino Jankov, Chris Ward
August 2018
Beginner
172 pages
2h 36m
English
SitePoint
Content preview from A Developer's Guide to Ethereum

Chapter 3: How the Lightning Network Helps Blockchains Scale

by Bruno Škvorc

This introduction to the Lightning Network was originally published at Bruno’s Bitfalls website, and is reproduced here with permission.

Bitcoin is currently impractical to use because of slow and expensive transactions plaguing its blockchain. Most people use it as a store of value (the digital gold fallacy) or to trade on exchanges. A concept known as the Lightning Network was introduced as a solution to this scalability issue.

The Basics of the Lightning Network

The Lightning Network was first described in a 2015 whitepaper by Joseph Poon and Thaddeus Dryja. The concept, however, was actually introduced by Satoshi Nakamoto in an email to Mike Hearn in 2013.

The Lightning ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781492069218Errata Page