I love Bitcoin, but fees are here to stay and will grow with price and usage. They are basically an inherent thing of the network. We can disagree when there should be fees, but they will show up eventually in a blockchain to prevent storing spam forever.
So Bitcoins solution to high fees is the lightning network. It’s a second layer of “owed” payments that only have to be written into the blockchain when they enter lightning and when there is a dispute.
This has some friction especially opening payment channels come at the cost of a bigger sized transaction and have to lock a bigger amount of bitcoin. So if you want to play around with just ten dollars, you should choose a custodial solution first, before joining the non-custodial world.
Through this network we’re free to spend small payments like a few Satoshi, without running into scaling problems and will be able to add smart contracts and other feature on top of it.
Find here a list of current apps, tools for lightning usage and development.
Book:
Targeting Users:
Phone apps for small sums:
Breeze (non-custodial)
Strike (custodial Whatsapp for Money, Browser Extension, global soon ™)
Zap (non-custodial)
Wallet of Satoshi (custodial)
Bluewallet (custodial, easy)
Eclair Mobile (non-custodial)
Raspberry Pi setup for home use:
Umbrel (Lnd based, Tor, easy & beautiful, integrated app-store)
Raspiblitz (Lnd based, Tor, can connect to Apps e.g. Zeus, extensible)
Mynode (easy)
Bigger money stored:
Targeting Developers:
General Implementations:
LND (feature-rich)
Eclair (easy)
c-lightning (reliable)
Tools:
Polar (Instantly launch a test-lightning network)
Lightning Development Kit Square (soon ™)
Lightning Apps:
BTC Pay Server (Self-hosted payment processor)
RGB (Smart Contracts for Bitcoin, 3rd layer, soon ™)
Sphinx Chat (Pay and Interact with podcasts on lightning)
RTL Ride the lightning (lightning front-end)
Lightning Bits (lightning front-end)
Thunderhub (lightning front-end with monitoring)
