BREAKDOWN: A Primer on Bitcoin’s Lightning Network
CoinDesk Podcast Network
CoinDesk
4.8 • 689 Ratings
🗓️ 29 June 2022
⏱️ 13 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A 101 on Bitcoin’s growing layer 2.
This episode is sponsored by Nexo.io, NEAR and FTX US.
On today’s episode, NLW gives a 101-level overview of the Lightning Network, including where it came from, how it works, and who is building on it.
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“The Breakdown” is written, produced by and features Nathaniel Whittemore aka NLW, with editing by Rob Mitchell and research by Scott Hill. Jared Schwartz is our executive producer and our theme music is “Countdown” by Neon Beach. The music you heard today behind our sponsors is “Catnip” by Famous Cats and “I Don't Know How To Explain It” by Aaron Sprinkle. Image credit: Jira Pliankharom/Getty Images, modified by CoinDesk. Join the discussion at discord.gg/VrKRrfKCz8.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. |
| 0:09.1 | It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. |
| 0:15.0 | The breakdown is sponsored by nexo.io, near an FTX, and produced and distributed by CoinDesk. |
| 0:24.6 | What's going on, guys? It is Wednesday, |
| 0:32.0 | June 29th. And today we are looking at lightning. Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying the breakdown, please go subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review, or if you |
| 0:37.1 | want to dig deeper into |
| 0:37.9 | the conversation, come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go to |
| 0:42.5 | bit.ly slash breakdown pod. Also, a disclosure, as always, in addition to them being a sponsor |
| 0:48.6 | of the show, I also work with FTX. So today is the third and final day of me being out for some travel, so I had prepared |
| 0:56.9 | these episodes in advance, and I thought it would be really fun to talk about Lightning and |
| 1:01.7 | give a little bit of an overview for those of you who haven't spent too much time with it. |
| 1:05.7 | For those who are deep in the Lightning space, this will be very rudimentary and oversimplified, |
| 1:11.8 | but given how much excitement there is around building new applications on Bitcoin, especially heading into this |
| 1:16.7 | bare market, I thought it would be a good time to do a little briefing. So first up, what is Lightning, |
| 1:22.4 | where it came from when it started? Lightning was proposed in a 2015 white paper by researchers Joseph Poon and |
| 1:29.6 | Thaddeus Dryja. The network itself was first launched in March 2018. The Lightning Network is one |
| 1:35.9 | of the layer two solutions for Bitcoin. It is designed to help deal with inherent issues with |
| 1:41.2 | blockchain such as speed and cost. Remember, while the store of value |
| 1:45.8 | use case of Bitcoin has been front and center for some time now, there has always been a question |
| 1:50.8 | about how it could also function as a pure-to-peer payments layer. In fact, we fought an entire |
| 1:55.9 | block-size war about exactly this question. Lightning has been developed by companies like Lightning Labs, |
| 2:02.2 | whose first $2 million seed round featured investors such as Jack Dorsey. So as a Layer 2 network, |
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