Section 2 Recap

Ten days of real world Lightning. Here’s the picture.

Sending is instant and nearly free. A Lightning payment reaches its destination in under a second for fractions of a cent in fees. The experience is closer to a text message than a bank transfer.

Receiving requires inbound liquidity — space on the receiving side of a channel. Good wallets handle this automatically. Lightning addresses make receiving as simple as sharing a username.

Remittances are Lightning’s strongest current use case. The $800 billion global remittance market charges 6-7% average fees. Lightning charges fractions of a cent. For families receiving monthly transfers from abroad, the difference is hundreds of dollars per year.

El Zonte proved the circular economy concept. A small Salvadoran beach town ran a Lightning-based local economy for two years before the government made it policy. Workers earned sats, merchants accepted sats, value circulated without conversion to dollars at every step.

Merchants who benefit most: those with high chargeback risk, high international customer volume, or operating in countries with weak banking infrastructure. The economics shift depending on context.

Strike demonstrated that Lightning remittances aren’t theoretical. A dollar sent from the US arrives in El Salvador in under a second for one cent. The incumbent industry charges $28 for the same transfer.

The next ten days cover the practical tools — Lightning wallets, Lightning addresses, Zaps, and the daily use layer that’s being built on top of Bitcoin’s base.

Tomorrow: Lightning wallets explained — custodial vs self-custodial.

— The Daily Bit