Introducing the Lightning Network
The Lightning Network is a payments layer built on Bitcoin. It enables very fast, very secure, and very inexpensive payments, and it might change the world in the near future.
- Want a Lightning wallet without running a node? Start with Rizful.
- Want to accept Bitcoin on your website or app? Use OpenReceive -- free, open source, no account or KYC.
- Selling on Shopify? See BLFS: Bitcoin Lightning for Shopify.
This is an opinionated guide​
This guide is strictly based on my own experience as a developer, node runner, and student of economics.
This guide is opinionated, and intended to be practical instead of theoretical.
The first part, where I discuss the basics of Bitcoin and the Lightning Network, should be understandable by everyone.
As I get into the finer details of running a node, it gets a bit more technical.
The site has grown beyond the node-running tutorial, too: there are sections on using Rizful, our hosted wallet; Lightning Tips, including how to accept payments with OpenReceive; Lightning Services we offer to other node runners and developers; and BLFS, for accepting Lightning on a Shopify store.
There is a Github repository for this guide​
The LND-With-Docker repository contains all the code used in this tutorial. We do recommend you follow the tutorial in the order presented instead of trying to hack your way through it with just the Github repository.
Why I wrote this guide​
The Lightning Network has been running on mainnet since 2018, and even now most of the documentation is highly technical and not-so-fun to read.
The existing documentation tends to intermix stuff you definitely need to know (like basic concepts around payment channels) with stuff you almost certainly do not need to know, like details about the "wire protocol".
My background is as a web developer, using frameworks like Ruby On Rails and React, which typically have really good and complete documentation, which can be understood even by fairly dense developers such as myself.
I noticed that the available tutorials for the Lightning Network were nowhere near as "friendly" as I was used to. So I figured I would write some docs myself.
If you're a web developer like me and you just want your site or app to accept Lightning payments, you can skip straight to OpenReceive: it's our free, open-source library for Rails, Node, and React/Vue/Svelte, and it pays straight into your own wallet.
OK, let's get going.
Let's start at the very beginning, with a refresher on Bitcoin...