I'm too late.

I'm too late to be an early adopter of BTC, I screwed around in my CompSci classes a decade before the Genesis block instead of helping. I'm too late to mine BTC on my CPU, by almost a decade. I'm too late to mine BTC on my GPU, by several years. I'm almost too late to mine BTC on my ASICs, they'll be out of date in a few years. Maybe less. I've made TWO purchases with BTC, both to buy another ASIC. I'm sold some BTC. Ok, I'm too early there, but regret it just the same.

I just spun up a testnet BTC node and installed the Eclair Lightning Network client.

I did it on an OS I'm really not familiar with, Ubuntu is just different enough from Win10 to make me struggle. I could have done it on Win10, I chose the harder route.

I'm NOT too late to do my little part to make this happen. I opened a channel between a testnet Core wallet and an online testnet wallet and bounced Lightning transactions back and forth for an hour, taking only a few seconds between transactions. Paid only 2 miner's fees.

I could have sent transactions to anyone running a connected Lightning client just as fast. And vice versa. It took half an hour to fund the channel, yes. And another half an hour or so to secure my funds when I closed the channel. Had I done those transactions without Lightning, it'd have taken most of a day. Not even Bitcoin Cash's large block size could have done that, its limited by the same 10 minute heartbeat Bitcoin has.

THIS feels like the future. I am NOT too late. Noone is.

Edit: Holy moly my inbox. Thank you for the Gold, now I have something more to research. :) I did NOT expect this post to get that many hits overnight! It took me a while to read thru the comments, every one of them to this point, and I'm glad to see so much agreement, discussion, arguments, and even veiled insults to my username. Its all good, I get far worse on a good day IRL. A few more people know about LN, some good explanations were given, that is the kind of thing we're going to need to bootstrap the LN network. The complexity is a problem compared to standard bitcoin transactions and wallets...but you realize just how complex those wallets and transactions are? Maybe not, well-designed software hides all the gorey details. I imagine LN wallets will be the same given more development, all the channel business hidden to anyone using Easy-mode and the refunding of channels handled behind the scenes.

Probably not the best place to put something like this, in an edit, but oh well. Again, thank you everyone, I'm gonna go do something not-BTC related for a few hours now, have fun!

Submitted December 27, 2017 at 03:05PM by NDragon951 http://bit.ly/2Cdp81p