This is an experimental post where I am going to take the twitter feed of a personality in the bitcoin world and post their tweets over the course of one month. This month I have found the tweets of Alex Bosworth to be very interesting as the document the birth of Lightning Network apps or Lapps for short. Alex is a great developer building some great products on the Lightning Network platform. As Alex would say first and foremost be careful using any software on the Lightning Network because the software is not yet stable and ready. Don’t risk real coins on LN at the moment until all the bugs are ironed out, but it is very interesting to make transactions on the testnet to see how they work and to see how incredibly fast and cheap they are.
Some of Alex’s products built on Lighting Network:
Y’alls: Read and write articles, with Lightning Network micropayments
HTLC.me: Hosted wallet great for quickly trying out Lightning payments on the Bitcoin testnet.
Zigzag: Cryptocurrency trading using Lightning (custodial)
Here are some of the developments tweeted by Alex during January:
You can now trade your testnet Lightning coins for testnet altcoins! Check out using @Bitlumio to swap your https://t.co/cOYGcwWbbP freebie testnet coins onto a testnet @BitGo web wallet. pic.twitter.com/OC1EIrw3xA
— Alex Bosworth ☇ (@alexbosworth) January 6, 2018
Podcasts: meet Lightning! Publish your podcasts by signing up and adding your podcast's RSS feed. Run your own podcast site or help build lncast with https://t.co/s2YSlyxRZJ – open source software, MIT licensed. pic.twitter.com/ZcPtenwgDl
— Alex Bosworth ☇ (@alexbosworth) January 6, 2018
Making payment channel videos reminds me of accounts of filming Bruce Lee, you have to slow down the camera to see what actually happens.
— Alex Bosworth ☇ (@alexbosworth) January 7, 2018
https://twitter.com/alexbosworth/status/951521050155565056
Working on a new feature for https://t.co/cOYGcwWbbP – simple cross-chain swapping (non-atomic). This works using the @Bitlumio API. Need to work out some kinks in the API integration, but simple non-atomic instant trades are pretty easy. Down the road? Full atomic p2p swaps. pic.twitter.com/T30T7OwHnL
— Alex Bosworth ☇ (@alexbosworth) January 14, 2018
If you told me just a month ago that I’d have 12 mainnet channels open in Jan I wouldn’t have believed it https://t.co/uQHUIH6xC3
— Alex Bosworth ☇ (@alexbosworth) January 17, 2018
ThunderDice: https://t.co/Db1shHW6SC Provably fair
— Alex Bosworth ☇ (@alexbosworth) January 19, 2018
Benefit of SegWit really showing with the signature heavy 2-of-3 witness transactions becoming much more cost efficient. https://t.co/qiMIPc5FRu
— Alex Bosworth ☇ (@alexbosworth) January 20, 2018
There's a lot of great excitement for LN but some cold water is reasonable too. LN's privacy and security properties are good, but different from on-chain and they are not perfect. Existing implementations have some critical bugs and upcoming breaking changes. LN is just starting
— Alex Bosworth ☇ (@alexbosworth) January 20, 2018
It's easy to make cool demos when you are building on a great platform. It's the underlying architecture that makes things possible. @btcdrak, @LukeDashjr, @morcosa, @pwuille, @roasbeef, and countless others tireless efforts over the years have created an amazing platform for dev
— Alex Bosworth ☇ (@alexbosworth) January 22, 2018
Worked on a new beta feature for https://t.co/cOYGcwWbbP on the weekend: a Lightning powered storefront. It's still a "secret" feature but you can type enable-store in the send field and hit enter if you want to try it out. pic.twitter.com/ifEz54av3v
— Alex Bosworth ☇ (@alexbosworth) January 22, 2018
3 months of LN growth pic.twitter.com/9AutF7WuJH
— Alex Bosworth ☇ (@alexbosworth) January 23, 2018
https://twitter.com/alexbosworth/status/955870434230132736
My shop payment video doesn't show how fast the actual settlement of Lightning is because of UI and QR scanning time. I made another video that shows the speed better. Look for the gray bar on the register, the LN payment takes from when I press Enter to when that bar appears. pic.twitter.com/mAgu6eb6XK
— Alex Bosworth ☇ (@alexbosworth) January 24, 2018
Scary how LN mainnet is growing, my local network is now just a small part of the whole pic.twitter.com/YRcaj2BjHo
— Alex Bosworth ☇ (@alexbosworth) January 24, 2018
New LN wallet "ln-pay" integrated with Firefox with protocol handlers, only 532kb on disk, fastpay with whitelisted pubkeys, MIT licensed.https://t.co/PIkzjJEgLH pic.twitter.com/ZhwfNFeEhz
— Alex Bosworth ☇ (@alexbosworth) January 31, 2018
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