After the fall of TerraUSD and Luna, respectively stablecoin and native cryptocurrency of the Terra blockchain, the whole crypto market has suffered massive declines which still have not returned the lost trust of many investors.
However, many other speculators and hopeless optimists, as well as supporters of the digital age, admit that this may be the best time to invest in BTC!
On the other hand it is not the first time that the volatility of BTC makes wallets tremble. In short, in spite of the declines in the crypto market, BTC is always on the run!
Bitcoin breaks historical capacity records with Lightning Network
The cryptocurrency market could evolve over time also thanks to the problems that blockchains initially presented, always finding new solutions based on needs.
To remedy its own, Bitcoin has started using Lightning Network, improving the protocol from time to time.
The Lightning Network is a protocol associated with Bitcoin that has the task of drastically improving its speed of transactions and reduce their costs in the same way.
Some of the readers may wonder why to use another technology and not the same BTC blockchain to carry out transactions, but the reason is immediately explained.
Why does Bitcoin use Lightning Network?
The problem of the crypto king was the quantity of transactions increasing over the years.
The blockchain is not managed to sustain a high number of payments in Bitcoin and this is translated into slow and expensive operations, which have made scalability of cryptocurrency a huge problem.
Thanks to the Lightning Network, this problem has been largely resolved and now it is possible to take advantage of these real payment channels associated with the crypto-flag to carry out almost instant transactions at almost zero costs.
By executing an operation within the LN protocol, in fact, it will be possible to perform many others without burdening the BTC blockchain, guaranteeing an increase in scalability, that is the constant increase in the number of transactions, taking advantage of these payment channels.
How do I pay with Bitcoin using this protocol?
Not everyone knows how to use the Lightning Network to be able to pay with Bitcoin.
To start using LN with BTC you need to send cryptocurrencies to a digital wallet that supports Lightning such as Blue Wallet, Wallet of Satoshi, Phoenix or Zap.
This will lock units of cryptocurrency to initiate a payment channel that will allow subsequent transactions by spending the tokens sent to the protocol.
Whoever receives the payment creates a sort of alphanumeric code, which is often provided in the form of a QR code.
Obviously a greater number of users adhering to the protocol also makes it possible to facilitate even the usual transactions because, having a payment channel already existing, they will literally be instantaneous.
Read also: Find out what Bitcoin halving is and why it matters!
Cryptocurrencies that adopt the Bitcoin Lightning Network
Obviously the main use of the treated protocol is not only Bitcoin, but there are other cryptocurrencies that exploit its potential.
One of them is Litecoin which, not only has seen a reduction in transaction times and costs, but has seen the possibility to be traded with BTC within the same network.
Others then used the Lightning Network to support their own blockchains. One is Zcash and Bolt, inspired by the LN protocol to encourage anonymity of transactions.
Not too different for Decret and Raiden, the latter based on Ethereum, who have been able to exploit the support of Lightning Network to improve the performance of their blockchain with this great technology.
