The Lightning Network Explained (Litecoin/Bitcoin)

What Hacker News said

Recommends nadaviv · 2017-02 · on “The True Cost of Bitcoin Transactions”

> partly because these off-chain networks would quickly form large central "hubs" which would obviate many of the benefits of Bitcoin The Lightning Network is open-source and decentralized. It has no "hubs", but rather just peers that route payments to each-other using a payment routing algorithm. Lightning has no counterparty risk, as no one can ever steal your bitcoins and you're always in full control. The best way to describe Lightning is as an write-cache layer. It improves the scalability properties of Bitcoin by many factors, makes micro- and nano- payments a reality, reduces fees to fractions of a cent, and even improves privacy (using a Tor-like onion routing for anonymized payments

Recommends apo · 2018-03 · on “First Lightning mainnet release”

Each transaction spending the locked funds bears the signature of the party making the payment. The other party can then provide the counter-signature making the transaction valid on the Bitcoin network. The main security problem to solve is preventing one party from publishing a previous channel state (half-signed transaction) giving themselves more money than they actually have by rights. For example, Alice and Bob might start with a channel giving each of them 5 bitcoin. Then Alice makes two one-bitcoin payments to Bob: A | B ------ 4 | 6 3 | 7 Alice decides she wants to take back her last payment and instead publish the earlier transaction (signed by Bob) giving herself 4 bitcoin rather

Cites kordless · 2017-05 · on “Coinbase adds support for Litecoin”

I would modify that slightly and say Litecoin is back because of the Lightning Network, which benefits greatly from features provided by Segwit, and which itself leverages payment channels backed by multi-sig addresses. While Lightning can be enabled without Segwit, it's far more trustworthy with it, than without it. [this video]