[Lightning] I didn't believe it until I saw it

Moderately long post, tl;dr at the bottom.

I've seen lightning transaction gifs and videos over and over. Today, I decided to fire up a lightning node on my laptop and give it a shot.

I followed this walk-through for mac (I adapted it to Arch Linux) for setting up Bitcoin TestNet Node with Eclair Lightning (it's practically the same as Mac, except for the installation process).
Running on Arch caused the problem of accidentally installing the latest dev version of Bitcoin Core (AUR:bitcoin-git) - also had some compilation issues because upstream moved some files and this hadn't been updated in the PKGBUILD.

The latest dev version of Bitcoin Core included the SegWit address generation by default, which was very nice, didn't have any bugs using it in the brief period I used it.

After a couple of hours of syncing the TestNet blocks on my laptop, I started up Eclair and got Eclair and Bitcoin Core connected (had to use bitcoin-qt --deprecatedrpc=addwitnessaddressbecuase Eclair calls a soon-to-be deprecated function), sent myself some tBTC, and started opening up channels.
Once I had about 3 channels open, I went to everyone's favorite online coffee shop and rewarded myself with some imaginary coffee.

My mind was absolutely blown at how fast the transaction went through and how insanely low the fees were (10 sat).

I went to test a transaction with a couple more hops, bought myself an imaginary 100eur Steam voucher, paid 100 sat in fees, near instant transaction (my Eclair client took a couple seconds to find a route to bitrefill)

Lightning truly is an incredible addition to Bitcoin, big things are coming.

tl;dr - Saw a couple lightning transaction videos and gifs, didn't really sink in how amazing this really is, decided to give it a shot on linux, mind=blown

Submitted January 18, 2018 at 09:48PM by Kill3rism http://ift.tt/2FR9dET