Blockchain News: Lightning Loop Alpha to Improve the Bitcoin Lightning Network!

Hello dear readers,

even the blockchain of the first and oldest cryptocurrency Bitcoin is far from perfect and work continues on improving the technology. Now a new suggestion has been made to further develop the Bitcoin Blockchain named "Lightning Loop Alpha" as an enhancement to the Lightning network again.

In this post I would like to share a translation of an article with more information about this topic.

Here you can find the original article in German: 

https://www.btc-echo.de/lightning-loop-alpha-ohne-verstopfte-kanaele-blitzschnell-bitcoin-versenden/

Picture Source Shutterstock and BTC-Echo

"The Bitcoin Lightning Network serves to relieve the blockchain. It provides the ability to perform microtransactions, significantly accelerating the speed of transactions. To further improve, Lightning Loop has now been launched.

Lightning Loop is designed to simplify the process of receiving Lightning transactions and make them more cost and time efficient. In a March 20 blog post, Alex Bosworth and Bryan Vu announce that they are responding to requests for receiving Lightning transactions with their new Lightning solution.

Lightning Loop Alpha and relieving the channels

With the Bitcoin Lightning Network or when sending and receiving, there is a fundamental problem: the channels can "clog up". Because the transaction volume within the Lightning channels is limited. The more satoshis you send in one channel, the more you can receive - and vice versa. So Satoshis can move freely in a Payment Channel of the Lightning Network, but the total remains constant for a while.

Lightning Loop should now open up the possibility to outsource the funds. So you can expand the "Inbound Capacity", ie the maximum capacity of the payment channels. Because with the Lightning Loop the sent Bitcoin or Satoshis are outsourced into wallets or exchanged directly in Fiat currency. This frees the channel and you can continue to use it for transactions. Thus, it should be possible for users of the Bitcoin Lightning Network to receive more payments with the same channel.

For the future, the developers plan to develop the counterpart to Loop Out: Loop In. This should make it possible for users to fill the payment channels again with the outsourced Bitcoin:

"Lightning Loop's vision is to enable users to securely move money into and out of the Lightning Network using unrendered Bitcoin contracts, which allows users, businesses and routing node operators unlimited access to the Lightning channels which makes the network more efficient, more stable and less expensive. "

The software and protocol are open source and licensed by MIT. You can try the alpha version here. The loop-out transactions are initially limited. So users can chase the maximum amount of 0.01 Bitcoin or one million Satoshis through the channels. There are no fees for this during the alpha phase, but network fees for outsourcing are already available."

Source of the original article in German: 

https://www.btc-echo.de/lightning-loop-alpha-ohne-verstopfte-kanaele-blitzschnell-bitcoin-versenden/

Best regards

Michael Thomale