The Lightning Torch

In January 2019, a Twitter user called @hodlonaut started an experiment.

He sent 100,000 satoshis — about $4 at the time — via the Lightning Network to someone he trusted, with a message: add 10,000 sats and pass it on.

The payment travelled. Person to person. Country to country. Each recipient added sats and sent it to someone they knew on the Bitcoin Lightning Network. The chain grew.

By the time it ended four months later, the Lightning Torch had passed through 292 people across 56 countries. It had been held by Jack Dorsey (then CEO of Twitter), Lightning Labs CEO Elizabeth Stark, and the CEO of Binance. It had crossed borders that traditional payment systems serve poorly or not at all.

The experiment demonstrated several things simultaneously.

The Lightning Network worked — reliably, across geographies, in the hands of ordinary users and executives alike. The payments cleared in seconds. The fees were fractions of a cent.

The Bitcoin community was genuinely global and connected. The chain moved through Africa, South America, Asia, Europe, and North America without friction. A trust network that had been built through shared interest in a technology proved capable of passing value around the world.

And perhaps most powerfully, it was human. No company organised it. No government approved it. One person started something, and 291 others chose to participate.

That’s what a genuinely decentralised, permissionless network looks like in practice.

Tomorrow: Bitcoin in sports — athletes taking salaries in Bitcoin.

— The Daily Bit