Bitcoin Forum

I wanted to try out a real trade using lightning network.  I don't know of any pizza places near me that accept lightning bitcoin yet but a friend from London agreed to do it and he sub contracted out the pizza delivery to a local shop.

In short, I paid bitcoin using the lightning network and he arranged for pizza to be delivered to me.  In this trade my friend is just a middle man that is taking the risk on accepting lightning payments, but it demonstrates the basic premise of how this works for everyday transactions.  It could just as well be the pizza shop accepting the payment directly with their own lightning node.
I wanted two pizzas and to try to do it as close to atomically as possible.  I didn't want to prepay and end up with no pizza.  As far as I know we don't yet have pizza/bitcoin atomic swap software but we improvised and decided that I would need to provide the payment hash preimage to the delivery driver in order to claim my pizza.  If I can't produce the preimage, proving that I paid, then the pizza would not be handed over and it would be destroyed.  This works because I can't get the preimage without paying the invoice.  I agreed to open a channel and fund it with a sufficient amount for what we estimated the cost would end up being.  After we agreed to these terms my friend was able to verify that I funded a channel on the blockchain, which shows that I at least have the money (bitcoin).  He is taking on some entrepreneurial risk and prepaying his sub contractor to prepare and deliver the pizza to me, but at this point I have not risked my bitcoins, they're just committed to a channel.