Is Lightning working?

[abhutra]

I recently posted list of mobile lightning wallets. All seem very clunky. Is there a good way to see lightning working or wait is what we can do?

[Rath_]

The only way to find out if the Lightning Network is working, is to try it out. Some people complain about unsuccessful payments while others are excited about how fast and cheap they are. If you don't want to bother with syncing up a full node then use one of the mobile wallets which you have posted. There are quite a lot of shops which accept Lightning Network payments so you can easily test it by yourself.

Take a look at this topic in which I tried to answer the most common questions regarding the Lightning Network.

[Quickseller]

This depends on your definition of “working”.

There are many channels currently open and new/additional channels being opened at a fairly decent pace.

There have been reports that many LN transactions fail, and according to some, the fail rate is well above 50%. This is likely due to some channel participants not having timely access to their private keys.

Due to the nature of LN, it is not possible to determine how many transactions take place over LN. Nor is ur possible to tell the value of transactions.

There was a situation a few months ago when someone’s hard drive crashed, they recovered their LN wallet from a backup, however they didn’t have the most recent LN transaction in their backup so they closed the channel with not the most recent transaction and they lost their entire balance.

[garyiskidding]

This article can get  you started with running your own lightening node.

https://medium.com/@stadicus/noobs-guide-to-%EF%B8%8F-lightning%EF%B8%8F-on-a-raspberry-pi-f0ab7525586e

To see if its running or not, i would advise that you set it up and see it for yourself.

Cheers..!

[odb36]

Yes it is working on the Bitcoin mainnet. You can view some stats about lightning at https://1ml.com/ and https://graph.lndexplorer.com/

You can download and try out the desktop ZAP wallet. If you want to use online wallet you can try https://htlc.me/

You can connect to my hosted mainnet lightning node: 0387c1e8e5e83d77885a8e90682f1dfc922daf702ae56463e8bb5baba181ce52a7@173.249.2.209:9735