There aren't many steps left before bitcoin's Lightning Network will be finished – or at least an early version of it.
The big picture looked starkly different a year and a half ago when developers Joseph Poon and Tadge Dryja first put forth a white paper outlining a way to expand bitcoin to accommodate millions of transactions per second. It was a cool idea to use hashed timelock contracts (HTLC) to build a top-layer to bitcoin that didn't require any extra trust in intermediaries, but there wasn’t a clear-cut path forward from the theoretical.
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