A lightning channel creates an open tab between you and me of a fixed amount that automatically updates how much of that amount each of us owns as we pay each other back and forth for different reasons, and it creates it in such a way that either one of us can close the tab at any time and retrieve our portion of the total amount, or we can leave it open perpetually until we both decide to close it out and settle up.
Discussion
i kinda understand it, but the purpose of it seems blurry for me 🤔💜
It’s much faster than you and me driving across town and paying each other in cash every time we need to pay each other for something.
what are the differences in speed? 🤔
To continue the analogy, it’s the difference of me texting you that I’m moving $20 of our shared balance back to your side of the books, which would take a few seconds, versus me hopping in the car and driving 10 minutes to your house. Well, on average it’s a 10 minute drive, but sometimes there’s a lot of traffic and it may take 30 minutes or an hour, or maybe I just took the scenic slow route because it was cheaper on tolls. Not to mention the added cost/fees associated with me having to make that drive.
To put it in bitcoin terms, a Lightning payment (us updating our shared balance/ledger) is nearly instant, versus an on chain transaction (me driving to your house to pay you in cash) which takes on average 10 minutes, but sometimes more or less depending on various factors.
This makes a lot of sense, thank you so much for this explanation man, the analogies really helped 💜💜💜
The purpose becomes clearer when other people open channels too. So if I also had a tab nostr:npub1lrnvvs6z78s9yjqxxr38uyqkmn34lsaxznnqgd877j4z2qej3j5s09qnw5 now if you wanted to pay me you could go through him instead of having to open a channel through me directly.
So if you want to be me 5 sats you’d debit 5 sats from your “tab” and corn would “forward” that and debit 5 from his tab with me. He’d have the 5 you sent and I would have the 5 he sent me so corn would be whole (no change in how much is on his side).
Now how we keep corn honest (and not keep the 5 sats for himself) goes into more complicated “fairness protocol”.
🤔 thank you so much for this 💜
Yes 🙌 And if you’re the middle hop of that route, or one of several hops in the middle, you can even choose to charge me a small % of the total amount I want forwarded as a way of compensating you for helping me get my payment to the final recipient. That’s where fees on lightning payments come into play.
Also, if there are other hops/forwards in between, those extra nodes only see the nodes directly adjacent to them in the sequence. Aka they even don’t know it was a payment from tanel to wolfbear
(this is true right 🤣)
Yes true 😂 Nodes along the route only know which node they received it from and which they sent it to.
Lighting tutorial team effort! Only on nostr. (I’m afraid some dork would have told me why I’m a moron on “another app”)
