If the Lightning Network is so useful today, it is in great part thanks to the fact that payments can be routed inside the network: if Alice wants to pay Bob, it isn’t necessary that she has a direct channel with him. Instead, she can have a channel with Carol and, if Carol has a channel with Bob, use Carol’s channel to reach Bob. With this mechanism arises a new question: how can such payments, that rely on the benevolence of third parties such as Carol, be achieved in a trustless way?...

The last two “long” articles of this blog were dedicated to special kinds of Lightning channels that seek, each in their own way, to enhance the user experience on the Lightning Network. This week, we will dive into anchor outputs, which aim to ensure channel closings are settled quicly, even in the case of a force close. This article will go into details as to how Lightning works in this regard, what are the issues and how anchor outputs can solve them....

Black squares on a white background You are either freedom or subjection Message to come or prison of paper Strange chessboard without pawn or king Deceitful sésame, Or key to millions. Each point on this map is a nail in the coffin We always bury something. In the end we are all smiths, All cartographers, all kings and pawns And it’s up to us to ignore the jesters And their black squares on a white background

I am increasingly convinced that the future of Bitcoin (at least, its short term future) lies in mesh networking. Intro Mesh networks are networks were nodes connect to one another dynamically and without any hierarchy. There is no central authority, every node is connected to other nodes with which it exchanges data. Bitcoin already looks a lot like a mesh network at the protocol level. Consider transactions or blocks propagation for example....

Today’s post was inspired by this very good question from @antward on Twitter: Millisats? I thought sats was the smallest unit? — Larix Lynx ⚡️ (@antwar) December 15, 2021 As you can see, I tried to give him a synthetic answer, but then I thought to myself: why not devote today’s short piece to this question? So here we are. 1 millisat = 0.001 sat That’s the shortest answer one could give....