The Crossroads of the Lightning Network: The Origins and Impact of Legitimacy

Original article by Jaleel, Luccy, BlockBeats

Original Editor: Jack, BlockBeats

In crypto circles, “legitimacy” is one of the most frequently used words in the last two years. Although this statement was first coined by ETH Fang (Vitalik wrote a blog post in March 2021 titled “Legitimacy is the Scarcest Resource in the Crypto Ecosystem”, which explains the concept of legitimacy), there is no shortage of legitimacy in the BTC community. For most people, the “child of legitimacy” of the BTC community is the Lightning Network.

At a time when the concept of “BTC ecosystem” is gaining momentum, various BTC scaling solutions such as sidechains and virtual machines have entered the field of vision of investors, but the mainstream view of the market on the Lightning Network seems to be still stuck in the stage of “payment channel”. With the continuous development of the BTC ecosystem, the Lightning Network began to face “transformation pressure”. This paper reviews the origin of the lightning network, the two main development entities, and explains its current dilemma and future development direction.

Satoshi Nakamoto’s email

When it comes to BTC, the Lightning Network is definitely a keyword that can’t be bypassed.

In the early years, there was little understanding of BTC and the role of BTC evangelist, so asking Satoshi Nakamoto directly was the only way to get a clear answer. In 2011, software developer Mike Hearn also devoted much of his energy to BTC development when he was a senior software engineer and technical lead at Google. Over the course of about five years of BTC development, Mike Hearn had various conversations with Satoshi Nakamoto via email before posting it as a historic document on his blog.

On March 7, 2011, Mike Hearn had just released BitCoinJ (an open-source BTC client library built and implemented BTC network protocols in Java under the name of Google under the Apache 2 license, ready to implement the full client pattern in the next month or two.

He emailed Satoshi Nakamoto and asked, “I don’t fully understand why the serial number is an attribute of TX input and not TX itself?”

To this, Satoshi Nakamoto replied: "Intermediate transactions do not need to be broadcast, only the final result will be recorded by the network. Just before nLockTime, the parties and some witness nodes broadcast the highest sequence tx they saw. This is Satoshi Nakamoto’s explanation of the payment channel, and it is also the prototype of the lightning network, the birth of its legitimacy.

If you want to go back even further, Bitcoin 0.1 includes a draft code that allows users to update the transaction before it is confirmed by the network.

Bitcoin 0.1 includes a draft payment channel. Source: GitHub Lightning Network Contributors: Blockstream and Lightning Labs

Payment channel and network design has evolved over the years, with the release of the Lightning Network whitepaper BTC early 2015. Unexpectedly, in the months that followed, throughout the spring and summer of 2015, BTC issues of scaling and disagreements over block size caps turned into open disputes.

In December 2015, Gregory Maxwell (one of the founders of Blockstream) presented an extension roadmap in a BTC developer email that included a focus on the Lightning Network. Much of the BTC technical community has expressed support for this BTC system capacity increase and is being implemented in the Bitcoin Core project. This has stimulated everyone’s expectations for the Lightning Network. The subsequent BTC expansion battle unexpectedly pushed the Lightning Network to the forefront.

BTCBlockstream

There seems to be a rumor that Blockstream is the “talker” behind the BTC. Such rumors are not groundless.

On October 23, 2014, Blockstream, one of the most influential companies building the Lightning Network, was founded, and Adam Back, the inventor of hashcash, brought together Matt Corallo, Greg Maxwell, Pieter Wuille, and many other BTC developers to found Blockstream and released their sidechain whitepaper.

Since its inception, Blockstream has been a pioneer in the development of the Lightning Network. As the founder of Blockstream, Adam Back’s influence cannot be underestimated. In a foreign ranking of “cryptocurrency” influence, Adam Back ranked fourth, and the top three were: Andreas Antonopoulos (BTC early evangelist), V God (founder of ETH), and Nick Saab (the proposer of the concept of “smart contract”).

Ranking of foreign “cryptocurrency” influence

The reason why Adam Back was so influential was back in 1997. At that time, the Internet was just emerging, and e-mail was the number one application for people to communicate at that time, but the large amount of spam made people unbearable, and many people began to try to solve it. Adam Back published an email titled “A partial hash collision based postage scheme” in which he introduced Hashcash, a mechanism that uses a technique called proof of work to prevent spam. For this reason, Adam Back is often referred to as the “father of PoW”.

All of this was made famous by Satoshi Nakamoto’s mention of Adam Back’s “Hashcash” in the BTC white paper, and gradually established its strong position in the crypto industry.

Among the founding members and major contributors to Blockstream are key members of BTC development team, such as Greg Maxwell and Pieter Wuille.

Greg Maxwell, a renowned cryptographer and software engineer, has made significant contributions to the privacy and scalability of BTC. Examples include homomorphic key inference used in BIP 32, as well as trustless privacy-preserving techniques such as CoinJoin and blinded proofs. Pieter Wuille has been a Bitcoin Core developer since May 2011. In 2012, Wuille released BIP 32, adding a hierarchical deterministic wallet to the BTC and also participated in the development of key technologies such as Segregated Witness (SegWit).

While in theory, anyone can contribute code to the BTC Core project, only those with commit access can incorporate that code into the actual BTC protocol. Pieter Wuille was one of only five people who could commit access to the BTC code repository at the time, and was the person who contributed the most code to the BTC project after Satoshi Nakamoto.

In 2015, when BTC community discussion about scaling was gaining momentum, a Zurich Institute of Technology paper, “A Fast and Scalable Payment Network with Bitcoin Duplex Micropayment Channels”, was published in late 2015. The paper’s solution relies heavily on timelocks as a “countdown device” for channel validity, and a cryptographic technique called “invalid trees” to invalidate stale channel transactions. This became the prototype of the technology that the Lightning Network later relied on for its livelihood. The paper’s two authors, Christian Decker and Roger Wattenhofer, both later joined Blockstream.

Unexpectedly, in the months that followed, and even throughout the spring and summer of 2015, BTC disagreements over scaling issues and block size caps turned into open disputes. On August 15, 2015, two of the BTC’s early technology pioneers, Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn, teamed up to announce in a blog post that their new version of BitcoinXT would implement the BIP-101 proposal, which would be activated without a miner vote. It was a day that came to be known as the “Day of the Block Wars,” during which Blockstream contributed greatly to the Lightning Network’s advancement.

In December 2015, Gregory Maxwell (one of the founders of Blockstream) presented an extension roadmap in a BTC developer email that included a focus on the Lightning Network. Much of the BTC technical community has expressed support for this BTC system capacity increase and is being implemented in the Bitcoin Core project. This has stimulated everyone’s expectations for the Lightning Network.

At the time, there were two very different views on the controversy between the Bitcoin Core development team and Bitmain.

On the one hand, Bitmain’s proponents argue that the Bitcoin Core development team is a bunch of stubborn programmers who stick to the original BTC kernel and refuse to make the necessary changes and adaptations. They see these developers as “old guys” who are immersed in their own technological world, ignoring the real needs of BTC development, and who are holding back progress. On the other hand, supporters of the Bitcoin Core development team believe that Bitmain is using its influence and information advantage in the industry to deliberately distort the facts and mislead the public and miners.

Adam Back, co-founder of Blockstream, came to Hong Kong for the consensus conference on behalf of BTC developers and mediators from both sides. As one of the oldest blockchain development companies, Blockstream not only intersected with Bitcoin Core, but also funded their development. Blockstream CEO Adam Back’s signature gave everyone the impression that the developers agreed to the Hong Kong consensus.

However, after the meeting, Bitcoin Core said that the developers who promised to make various changes at the meeting were all programmers who did not have access to the Core source code. None of the five people who had the right to change Core’s source code attended, let alone signed.

Adam Back also said that his signature at the meeting was only personal and could not represent Bitcoin Core’s agreement with the Hong Kong consensus. He himself took a 180-degree turn in his attitude and strongly opposed the Hong Kong Consensus that he had signed not long ago. The Hong Kong consensus was rejected by Bitcoin Core, but during the same period, the Lightning Network received “legitimacy” consensus from BTC developers.

In the summer of 2017, Segregated Witness was activated on BTC blockchain, paving the way for the implementation of the Lightning Network. Arguably, Greg Maxwell and Pieter Wuille played a crucial role in the upgrading of the BTC network, particularly the introduction of Segregated Witness (SegWit) and the development of the Lightning Network.

Since Blockstream employs a large number of Bitcoin Core developers, Blockstream has a lot of say in BTC development, which has attracted a lot of criticism. For example, some say that Blockstream actually controls the development of BTC (and some even say that Blockstream uses trolls in BTC communities to suppress opponents and control public opinion). According to Whale Calls’ analysis, 12%-20% of BTC code updates come from Blockstream developers.

A few years ago, much of the community’s analysis of Adam Back was that he wanted to profit from BTC. Because Blockstream’s business model is to sell sidechain/lightning network products and services, if the block scales, the sidechain/lightning network is useless, and Blockstream as a for-profit company will not be able to make money.

Lightning Labs: Lightning Network whitepaper authors parted ways

Perhaps the greatest legitimacy of Lightning Labs comes from its founders, Joseph Poon and Tadge Dryja, the authors of the Lightning Network whitepaper.

In the fall of 2015, the San Francisco-based startup, spearheaded by Elizabeth Stark and bringing together two co-authors of the Lightning Network whitepaper, Joseph Poon and Tadge Dryja, started its business with BlockStream. The biggest difference between the two is that Lightning Labs uses the Go programming language, while Blockstream uses the C programming language.

Not only did Lightning Labs make key contributions to the theoretical foundation of the Lightning Network, but it also released a beta version of the Lightning Network in March 2018, a move that marked a major milestone in the development of the Lightning Network.

The early team at Lightning Labs was no slouch behind Blockstream.

Prior to writing the Lightning Network whitepaper, Dryja founded mirro, a peer-to-peer trading system, and added the concept of prediction markets, as well as a PoW algorithm, Hashimoto, which was the predecessor of Dagger Hashimoto’s algorithm, which was an alternative to the ETH PoW algorithm ethash before it was launched.

In addition to Dryja, Poon, another author of the Lightning Network whitepaper, is also a top developer in the crypto industry. For example, Vitalik recently published a new article in support of the return of Plasma, which he and Poon jointly launched in 2017 to expand the second layer of the ETH Workshop, and the two are a strong partner working together on the scalability project. At the same time, Poon also worked on a project handshake that inherited the idea of namecoin.

Elizabeth Stark, co-founder and CEO of Lightning Labs, is a well-known entrepreneur and educator with a strong presence in the BTC community.

Olaoluwa Osuntokun (Roasbeef) is another co-founder of Lightning Labs and a prominent BTC developer who has made significant contributions to the development of the Lightning Network. He developed the LLD protocol based on the LIT protocol, which has been recognized by more developers.

Among the engineers at lightning labs, Alex Akselrod has to be mentioned. Four months before the release of the Lightning Network whitepaper, Alex Akselrod first proposed a two-way payment channel. The core idea is to introduce a decreasing time lock that allows the receiver to send funds to the sender a limited number of times. Alex Bosworth paid his own phone bill by establishing a Lightning channel with Bitrefill, creating the first transaction on the Lightning Network.

Image Credits:

However, at the end of 2016, just a year after the Lightning Network company was founded, two Lightning Network white paper authors split over a “quarrel”.

When he started working at Lightning Labs, the first version of the protocol developed by Dryja was called LIT, which was not compatible with BOLT developed by Blockstream, but the LND protocol developed by Olaoluwa, CTO of Lightning Labs, was compatible with BOLT and gradually became recognized by more developers.

So Lightning Labs decided to focus on LND, and Dryja chose to leave Lightning Labs to join the MIT Media Lab’s research community to continue developing Lit. Interestingly, this research community also employs Bitcoin Core’s top developer, Wladimir van der Laan, and several Bitcoin Core contributors.

In this regard, two authors of the Lightning Network whitepaper, Joseph Poon and Tadge Dryja, parted ways.

While losing Tadge Dryja, Lightning Labs has the support of Jack Dorsey. After leaving Twitter, Jack Dorsey actively promoted BTC and the Lightning Network through his company, Block Inc. (formerly Square Inc.).

In 2018, Dorsey participated in a seed round of funding for Lightning Labs, and in 2022, it participated in a $10 million Series A funding round for Lightning Labs to support its use to build the BTC Visa network. It’s fair to say that a series of developments and advancements of Lightning Labs are inseparable from Jack Dorsey, the former CEO of Twitter.

Subsequently, Square’s Square Crypto project changed its name to Spiral and developed the Lightning Development Kit (LDK), which enables developers to integrate Lightning Network transactions into mobile devices and point-of-sale terminals. In addition, Square has launched Cash App, a mobile payment solution that integrates with the Lightning Network.

In addition to Jack Dorsey, notable investors and institutions in Lightning Labs include Digital Currency Group, Robinhood, Ripple’s XpringRipple’s investment arm, former global co-founder Howard Morgan, Goldman Sachs Head of Securities John Pfeffer (formerly KKR member), and Forbes 30 Under 30 celebrity Jill Carlson。

Since then, protocols and applications related to the Lightning Network have been gradually enriched, such as OmniBOLT, an enhanced version of the BOLT protocol, Cash APP, and Strike, payment platforms that can support the BTC Lightning Network.

While there have been several teams working on the Lightning Network, the contributions of Blockstream and Lightning Labs are the most significant. Their role in the evolution of the Lightning Network’s legitimacy cannot be underestimated.

Driven by Blockstream and Lightning Labs, there were only two scaling options for BTC in those years, one for the Lightning Network and one for the other.

Crossroads of the Lightning Network

Although there is absolute legitimacy over the years, it is clear that in the past year, there have been more and more voices denying the Lightning Network, especially some veteran developers.

"The Lightning Network is scamming BTC users out of their time, effort, and money for up to 6 years. Fiatjaf, founder of Nostr, said. It’s fair to say that the debate over the BTC Lightning Network has intensified over the past two months. Recently, at least two developers have announced their retirement from work related to the Lightning Network.

Developers keep churning

In an email on October 16, Antoine Riard, a researcher and developer at Lightning Network Security, delved into the risk of losing funds for Lightning Network channels, primarily due to swap loop attacks on transaction pools. In particular, he mentioned a transaction relay jamming attack that affects Lightning Network channels, which is entirely possible in practice and can occur even without network transaction pool congestion.

At the same time, Riard said that he will stop participating in the development of the Lightning Network from now on, because this new replacement loop attack will put the Lightning Network in a very dangerous situation. However, from an optimistic point of view, this attack is extremely complex and not easy to implement.

Two weeks after Antoine Riard announced his departure, on October 30, Anton Kumaigorodski, the developer of the first mobile lightning wallet, also announced his departure on Nostr. Anton Kumaigorodski is the developer of BTC Lightning Wallet (BLW) and Simple Bitcoin Wallet (SBW), in addition to developing the Scala IMMORTAN library, which allows building mobile-optimized applications on top of the Lightning Network client. Contrary to many of the Lightning Network’s critics, he is fully aware of why LN as a technology remains challenging. Three reasons for his departure:

1. Serious Lightning Network development is difficult and time-consuming, the entire Lightning Network protocol is overly complex and getting worse, and at this point, only a very few well-known experts can develop at a very slow pace. Philosophically, I think BTC as a protocol should have a complexity barrier so that it doesn’t go beyond the point where the layman can’t understand and trust it, and I think the Lightning Network has passed that barrier.

2. After more than 6 years of struggle, the Lightning Network has transcended a community of mostly ideological users with no apparent success or views. My point is that ultimately the Lightning Network is not what the market as a whole expects from BTC, and people should look in other directions than stupid payments and not focus too much on the Lightning Network.

3. The remaining Lightning Network demand is mostly absorbed by various hosting solutions. In terms of user experience, a true non-custodial Lightning wallet is always worse than a custodial wallet, and historically, we’ve seen most of the remaining users consistently choose convenience over control. This makes developing an end-user unmanaged Lightning Network solution feel like the most thankless task in the world.

Robin Linus, BTC researcher and developer, after garnering a lot of attention after his “BitVM” paper was published, added, "It’s time to admit that we’re overselling the Lightning Network to each other, which may be a form of post-traumatic stress disorder after the block-size wars. Now it’s time to get over it. The Lightning Network doesn’t work for the masses. 」

Alexander Leishman, CEO and CTO of River, also noted the user experience (UX) challenges of consumer self-hosting in the Lightning Network, "The Lightning Network is a great fit for hosting-to-hosting transitions. The Lightning Network presents a significant user experience challenge for consumers to self-host. He highlighted the difficulties faced by ordinary users in managing their Lightning Network transactions.

In fact, the potential scalability limitations of the Lightning Network were evident in the early stages of development, and this was also mentioned in the Lightning Network’s whitepaper, especially regarding the potential lack of support for the required soft forks in the future, which was seen as a potential constraint on the scalability of the Lightning Network.

Against this backdrop, what are the two major Lightning Network companies, Blockstream and Lightning Labs, going to do?

Pressure from the sidechain

In addition to the Lightning Network, Blockstream has focused on its sidechain product, Liquid Network, in recent years.

In 2014, Adam Back, Matt Corallo, and Luke-Jr et al. co-published the paper “Enabling Blockchain Innovations with Pegged Sidechains”. This paper is the first public to propose the idea of driving blockchain innovation by anchoring sidechains.

On October 12, 2015, Blockstream announced the release of its Liquid sidechain prototype, which allows for the transfer of assets between the Liquid sidechain and the BTC mainchain. On October 11, 2018, the production readiness of the Liquid sidechain was officially launched, called the Liquid Network, which aims to facilitate interoperability between the BTC mainchain and the Liquid sidechain to extend the functionality of the BTC.

Adam Back’s paper is the prototype of not only Liquid but also Drivechain.

In a 2015 blog post, LayerTwoLabs co-founder Paul Sztorc further introduced the concept of Drivechain as a way to avoid hard forks due to consensus disagreements, thus preventing fragmentation of the BTC. Drivechain introduces an innovative way for BTC to allow the creation and deletion of sidechains, as well as the sending and receiving of BTC on the so-called “second layer” – sidechains. BTC and Drivechain form a parent-child relationship, BTC is the parent, Drivechain is the child, so Drivechain itself does not issue a native token. Instead, it relies entirely on the BTC transferred from the BTC network.

Drivechains was created and relies on the blind merge mining concept, which allows miners on BTC blockchain (parent) to mine on Drivechain (child) without running a Drivechain full node, and miners are paid in BTC. In 2017, Paul Sztorc proposed BTC improvement proposals, BIPs 300 and 301, which allow the creation of sidechains that are linked to the BTC mainnet but remain independent, which can operate independently and have different rules and functions.

Adam Back applauds Drivechain as a form of sidechain: "Kudos to Paul Sztorc and his team for implementing and validating the Drivechain design. He also thinks that Drivechains is cool and arguably more important or useful than Taproot. He also mentioned, “I think we’re going to need a large P2P sidechain that will allow the next billion users to benefit from unseized, censorship-resistant #bitcoin.” Opcodes that support P2P sidechains, such as LayerTwoLabs for Drivechain, Liquidium for P2P, and Rootstock. 」

It is worth mentioning that LayerTwoLabs was founded by Yale University economist Paul Sztorc and co-developed BTC developers CryptAxe (2016-present) and Luke Dashjr (2012-present). Luke Dashjr is the Bitcoin Core developer who criticized the BTC inscription the other day, and on August 22nd, he submitted a PR for BIP 300 to the Bitcoin Core Github repository, and the Bitcoin Core community began reviewing the Drivechain-related code.

The goal of LayerTwoLabs is to promote the BTC major upgrade proposals BIP 300 and BIP 301 to make BTC highly scalable, private, and better UX experience through DriveChain, while supporting the development of multiple sidechains, aiming to introduce decentralized applications and other extended functions of the blockchain into the BTC ecosystem to achieve the long-term healthy development of BTC. LayerTwoLabs has closed a $4 million angel round of funding and is currently working on the next round of funding.

Celebrities such as the aforementioned BitVM inventor Robin Linus, Nostr founders Fiatjaf and Anton Kumaigorodski have also expressed varying degrees of support for Drivechain while “putting down” the Lightning Network.

While there is support from many BTC OG, there may be a long way to go before a BIP proposal can be adopted and implemented on a large scale. "The optimistic estimate may be one or two years, and the pessimistic estimate may be three or four years. Mike Yeung, investor and head of Asia at LayerTwoLabs, the Drivechain development team, told BlockBeats. Launching Drivechain is certainly a daunting task, but LayerTwo Labs has some plans and strategies to accelerate the adoption of Drivechain technology.

According to Mike Yeung, from a technical standpoint, the Lightning Network has some security vulnerabilities. Second, the Lightning Network is not beneficial to miners, and in fact the relationship between the Lightning Network and miners is not good. As for the possibility of the Lightning Network as a scaling tool, "I don’t think it’s actually possible because it can’t implement smart contracts and it’s very limited in what it can do. I don’t think the Lightning Network will fail completely, but its prospects are not promising. 」

"Since 2017, countless investors, including individual investors, family offices, and VCs, have invested in the Lightning Network, and they can’t let their investments go to zero. Mike Yeung said to BlockBeats. At the same time, a number of influential figures, including the former CEO of Twitter and the leadership of MicroStrategy, have tied their public image and PR strategy to the Lightning Network’s brand. Due to their previous public support and the nature of the company, it is difficult for them to easily retract their previous remarks. As a result, they had to continue to promote the benefits of the Lightning Network, even though they recognized its limitations and may not be the ultimate solution to BTC scaling problem.

Try to break through

Blockstream focuses on the main sidechain research, while Taproot Assets focuses on growing Lightning Labs into a multi-asset network.

Taproot Assets is a Taproot-based CSV asset protocol for issuing assets on BTC blockchains. These assets can be traded instantly, in large volumes, at low cost, through the Lightning Network. At its core, Taproot Assets leverages the security and stability of the BTC, as well as the speed, scalability, and low cost of the Lightning Network.

The idea began in 2021 when the Lightning Labs team discovered that with the help of the Lightning Network, BTC had a national adoption in El Salvador. This led Elizabeth Stark, CEO of Lightning Labs, to realize that the focus was shifting from BTC assets to BTC monetary networks. So the team set out to envision a multi-asset network designed to expand the global reach of BTC and Lightning.

In September 2022, Lightning Labs released the initial Taro protocol code and announced a $70 million funding round. Taro later changed its name to Taproot Assets after blockchain startup Tari Labs accused Taro of having a similar name to its own trademark and providing similar services.

Lightning Labs designed a new protocol to avoid blockchain congestion, which is what Taro was designed to do. It is tightly integrated with the Lightning Network, allowing assets to be stored and transferred in the Lightning channel, allowing for instant, low-fee transactions. On the other hand, considering the “overwhelming” demand for stablecoins and Lightning Labs’ goal of “BTC the dollar”.

As Taproot Assets uses BTC liquidity to route assets issued on the protocol, the demand for BTC on the Lightning Network will be greater. As a result, BTC will be the U.S. dollar, fiat currency, and everything in between, thereby BTC the U.S. dollar. The ultimate goal of the Lightning Network is clear: with the release of Taproot Assets, it will focus on growing into a multi-asset network.

Over the past few months of testnet development, early adopters and teams have iterated to mint nearly 2, 000 assets on the testnet, experimenting with the potential of stablecoins, collectibles, and RWA assets, and synchronizing their nodes with the Universe server, a repository that holds all the information needed to initialize the wallet and download the wallet state.

Taproot Assets was designed and developed by Olaoluwa Osuntokun, co-founder and CTO of Lightning Labs. Olaoluwa Osuntokun is one of the main developers of the Lightning Network client LND and a contributor to the BTC client (BTCD), and is one of the few developers who has developed the Lightning Network and the BTC client with a deep understanding of BTC.

BTC’s entrepreneurial spirit

Unlike ETH, the “rigidity” of BTC is the root of its legitimacy. This “rigid” culture emphasizes decentralization, freedom, security, and privacy, but it also fosters a fair, diverse culture and technology community.

"If you’ve ever been to a conference on the BTC and the Lightning Network, it’s easy to see the difference between the two communities. 」

Here’s what Antoine Riard says about the BTC developer community in her blog. BTC conferences, primarily Bitcoin Core, typically focus on in-depth technical discussions, with an emphasis on security and protocol engineering, and are attended by experienced internet users, hackers of all kinds, and civil libertarians. After countless scams, they were naturally skeptical, but the intellectual debate remained open and honest.

In contrast, the crowd on the Lightning Network feels different. They are usually younger, more entrepreneurial, and the discussion is more focused on user experience and product design. The venue was vibrant, with a dizzying array of lightning apps for everyone to experience, and the impact of Silicon Valley was evident here. This can also be seen in the activities of the Lightning Torch Relay.

Compared to Bitcoin Core, the Lightning Network focuses more on innovation, utility, and the collaborative spirit of the community. This cultural difference reflects the diversity and complexity of BTC ecosystems, as well as the source of their charm and vitality.

In the context of the new “BTC ecology”, inscriptions and memes are flying, but when the tide recedes, what is left of this ecology? The author believes that the culture of BTC, as well as more entrepreneurial communities and teams, will be valuable assets for the development of BTC network.

Author’s note: This article attempts to summarize the origin story of the Lightning Network and its impact today, but the history of the Lightning Network is much richer than I already know, and putting it all together in a single article structure requires the omission of many details that do not reflect all the people, projects, and concepts that helped make this technology a reality. It’s best to think of this article as a rough summary rather than a detailed historical and technical explanation. Thank you to everyone who provided information and other feedback.

Resources:

1. 《THE HISTORY OF LIGHTNING: FROM BRAINSTORM TO BETA》，Aaron Van Wirdum；
2. “Once Upon a Time of BTC Forks”, BlockBeats;
3. 《Why we may fail Lightning》，Antoine Riard；
4. 《The joyful journey of building Bitcoin》，Antoine Riard；
5. “Lightning Labs Co-Creation: Taproot Assets Can Bring a BTC Renaissance”, BlockBeats;