[2017-12-30] Payment Provider Bitrefill Runs Successful Lightning Transaction Te

[Terraformer]

Payment Provider Bitrefill Runs Successful Lightning Transaction Test

Faster and cheaper bitcoin transactions may soon go alive.

A recent transaction posted on Twitter from inside the offices of prepaid phone payment provider, Bitrefill, used the Lightning network to top up a mobile (for real) at near instant speed with zero fee, as the Tweet touted.

While such transaction is not yet generally available to the public and may still be largely limited to command line interfaces, it nonetheless gives a peek into how the future may look like for regular bitcoin users.

Lightning has been one of the most watched bitcoin-scaling solutions. It's a new layer of abstraction atop the bitcoin protocol that allows transactions to occur more quickly and cheaply, without sacrificing the security. According to data site Bitinfocharts, currently the average transaction fee of bitcoin is at $36.

Yet, people who saw Bosworth's tweet may have been confused because the use case isn't visible to Bitrefill customers. According to CEO Sergej Kotliar, the transaction shown occurred when Bosworth was testing out Bitrefill's implementation with one of the company's developers, by invitation. Bosworth needed to refill his phone at the time anyway, so he decided to test it with real money. It worked.

Kotliar said:

"Everything is ready to go on our end, but we're not launching it yet until a Lightning wallet is released for general use on mainnet."

Wallets need to be updated in order to interact with the Lightning protocol layer, and this has not generally happened yet, Kotliar explained.

Bitrefill announced it was implementing Lightning in August, on its blog. Interested users and developers are able to test it now, with fake bitcoin.

Based in Stockholm, Bitrefill primarily focused on enabling people to pay for prepaid phones with cryptocurrency. "Our high-level company vision is to enable people all over the world to use bitcoin as money. Practically we enable people to use their coins to buy everything that is digital and money-like, so pay their bills, refill their phones, vouchers, etc," its CEO told CoinDesk in an email.

Noting that production implementations of new innovations often surface tricky problems, the small team at Bitrefill decided one way it could contribute to bitcoin was to move quickly to adopt Lightning, but doing so also helped it to address frequent concerns voiced by its consumers around transaction costs and delays.

"Recent mempool overloads have affected us hard, but over time a bigger concern for us has been confirmation times," Kotliar wrote. "Here the instant transactions of lightning lets us make a truly great customer experience. Lightning solves not only confirmation times but also many other UX problems of bitcoin."

Kotliar urged peer companies not to wait to implement Lightning. He wrote:

"Integration with Lightning has been surprisingly easy. It runs in a way similar to how bitcoin works, and fits neatly with how our and many company wallets work already."

Source: https://www.coindesk.com/payment-provider-bitrefill-runs-successful-lightning-transaction-test/

[Irvinn]

This article, like many others, does not answer the question of when, at last, a lightning network will be introduced into the bitcoin. It is clear that for this you need to update your wallets so that they can interact with this network. However, the intention to introduce this network into bitcoin was announced back in August. But in fact bitcoin continues to lose popularity because of the sharpened its shortcomings and fall in its value. And maybe someone is profitable now to deliberately lower the rate of bitcoin?

[Lucius]

As we can see Lightning Network is a very hot topic these days,and that is quite understandable because BTC have big problem with scalability.Since SegWit has not succeeded so far to solve this(mainly the fault of exchanges),LN is something that is imposed as the only solution.The biggest question is when it will become available for using,and we know it will not be before wallets providers&exchanges give green light.

Considering time which is past from SegWit availability and it is now 5 months,it is hard to expect that we may have LN in first six months of next year.But if there is desire and determination to do that, then it is possible that this happens earlier.

In the example of Bitrefill is clearly visible that things can develop fast and successfully,just imagine if others do the same thing.Unfortunately things are developing too slowly and we can only hope that developers will switch to higher speed in next year.

[1Referee]

This article, like many others, does not answer the question of when, at last, a lightning network will be introduced into the bitcoin.

Correct. Point is that I am sure the core devs don't even know when it will be ready for actual public use. I strongly hope that we'll be able to use it before the end of 2018, but that might turn out to be wishful thinking. Till that time, we just have to nurse ourself with these articles where LN has been tested successfully.

But in fact bitcoin continues to lose popularity because of the sharpened its shortcomings and fall in its value. And maybe someone is profitable now to deliberately lower the rate of bitcoin?

Bitcoin isn't losing popularity, stop taking nonsense from whatever news site or trolls for granted. Instead of looking at the fall in value, look at how we have gone up from $1000 in January, to $13,000 where we stand right now. People should learn to understand the market, because if they did, they would understand that the peak to near $20,000 levels was a greatly exaggerated panic buyers peak. Before the market even broke through the $19,000 level, it was already clear that it wouldn't break $20,000, so profits were taken by smart players.

[BitHodler]

Bitcoin isn't losing popularity, stop taking nonsense from whatever news site or trolls for granted. Instead of looking at the fall in value, look at how we have gone up from $1000 in January, to $13,000 where we stand right now.

That's pissing me off as well. Each time I see the mainstream media report about Bitcoin having decreased like $1000, they refer to the bubble that might be in process of bursting, which gets me badly annoyed.

If the stock market is down like 5% for the day, they talk about a complete blood bath that has been going on, while if Bitcoin is down with like 5%, no one here even cares about it since it is soo insanely common.

The mainstream media really needs to understand that the stock market can't be directly compared to the crypto market. If the stock market is up with 25% in let's say 5 or 6 months, they already talk about a forming bubble.

Same logic doesn't apply to Bitcoin!!

[error08]

This article, like many others, does not answer the question of when, at last, a lightning network will be introduced into the bitcoin.

Correct. Point is that I am sure the core devs don't even know when it will be ready for actual public use. I strongly hope that we'll be able to use it before the end of 2018, but that might turn out to be wishful thinking. Till that time, we just have to nurse ourself with these articles where LN has been tested successfully.

Indeed, all of this development brings so much attention since announced and makes people excited to see how it will be.
The most important about the date it will be implemented, it will going through all the drama again? to vote (consensus) whether it will be implemented or not? I'm not so sure about it.
But still, it's a good development for bitcoin scale problem and may has different outcome with segwit implementation.

[iamTom123]

The whole Bitcoin community is quite interested on Lightning Network as many see this as the best way to counteract the scalability problem and hopefully will be bringing back the transaction fees back to the normal and believable level. We should be pushing for its implementation earlier as much as possible as it can be that catalyst to re-energize the whole Bitcoin ecosystem. There is no doubt that there are now some who gone soured with Bitcoin because of its continuing problems but once this whole mess can be straighten out we can see a surge of interest back into Bitcoin. May that day come as fast as lightning!