Bitcoin Devs Host Lightning Hack Day – Crypto News Today

The meeting was described as a unique conference. Speakers took to the podium to showcase their ideas. The Lightning Hackday took place in Wall Street on October 27th and 28th and was considered a community-led endeavor accompanied by a heavy coding twist.

Bitcoin (BTC) Price Today – BTC / USD

NamePrice24H %
bitcoin
Bitcoin(BTC)
$0.00-0.15%

The two-day event featured Raspberry Pis, on the tables while developers spoke quietly about how to break a few rules without disrupting the scheme.

A future of mass adoption

Bitcoin’s lightning network is still budding, but most people hope it will step up to fix the biggest problem with the currency. The speed and clunkiness of BTC is a cause for concern and could affect mass adoption.

An engineer at SuredBits, a Blockchain data provider, Chris Stewart says,

For those of you who don’t know, blockchains suck,” This was his opening remark, and he hopes that the lightning network may change it.

There were so many projects on the floor, with passions high. These projects were tied together by the interest in developing for the potential of the technology as a payment mechanism for daily purchases.

More ideas

Lightning Labs engineer, Alex Bosworth states that the best ideas are yet to be created.

In comparison, he argued that the first developers behind Linux could never have thought their code will go so far.

He said,

Were they thinking ‘Oh this will be deployed in a billion phones?”

Bosworth told the developers to be open about their ideas. He also took his own advice and shared ideas on how the technology can be used. One of such instances is the monetized data layer. However, this will require some retouching of the underlying software.

He also argued that it could be used to fuel a wave of self-organizing games and to pay for enhanced payment privacy.

Other developers at the event also shared ideas.

One of them was Nayuta CEO Kenichi Kurimoto from Japan who presented an implementation of lightning which is optimized for the internet of things. It can work with car and even TVs that can be connected to the internet.

He believes that there is great potential in this case and argued that connected machines might send payments to one another. With this, he envisions that bitcoin will play the lead role since payments will be cheaper and different devices will be able to execute them.

The basic use cases

Despite the futuristic ideas, another focus of the conference was just making the technology easier to use.

Toby Algya, Bitcoin enthusiast, says,

There’s a lot going on, but there’s also not… I’m just trying to get lightning working. That’s my personal challenge for the day.”

Developers are also searching for ways to make this happen. For instance, a tool known as ‘Lightning Autopilot’ could make it easier by automating the process.

A data science consultant and a lightning developer, Rene Pickhardt, is working on this and argues that such designs questions should be answered earlier. He said,

Why is it important to think about it early? If we grow lightning for a couple of years, we might find out topology is not that great,”

A few important lightning developers will meet in Australia next week to speak about the future of the specifications of the project.  Autopilot is one of the ideas that will be discussed.

Princess Ogono is a writer, lawyer and fitness enthusiast. She believes cryptocurrencies are the future. When she's not writing, she spends time with her adorable cat, Ginger and works out often.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.