The artist Cryptograffiti has auctioned an art piece called ‘Black Swan’ for $0.000000037 using the Lightning Network. The auction held was different to the others. The winner was not the highest bidder, instead, it was the lowest. In this way, the world’s cheapest auction was held using the Lightning Network (LN).
Black Swan Art Piece Sold for $0.000000037
In a Reddit post, Cryptograffiti informed that he auctioned the piece to the lowest bidder. The main intention behind this was to promote the Lightning Network. The LN is the ultimate scaling solution for Bitcoin (BTC). During the bull run in 2017, Bitcoin transactions became slow and expensive to be performed on its blockchain. This is why developers have been working in order to launch an off-chain scaling solution. The LN will allow Bitcoin to process millions of transactions per second, for very low fees without congesting the Bitcoin’s network.
The Lightning Network has also been designed for processing instant microtransactions. This is expected to help different businesses. For example, it might be possible to pay for each minute of PPV content processing microtransactions at all times. Indeed, we could even end up paying just for the seconds that we have used a service.
The redditor wrote on the matter:
“The promise of micropayments was instrumental in my becoming artist in the space. In 2012, I first read about the idea of combatting email spam/DDOS attacks by charging negligible amounts of money to send messages/login. These were the first creative use cases I had heard for cryptocurrency.”
He went on explaining that it inspired him to think of different ways in which micropayments could benefit artists. This is why he started t post street art in the Streets of San Francisco with a public wallet for people to send small amounts of Bitcoin.
“I’m excited about a future where micropayments are omnipresent,” he explained. “Artists paid by the view, writers by the poem, musicians by the listen.”
At the time of writing, there are 4,715 nodes in the Lightning Network. At the same time, there are 15,409 channels opened and the network. The network capacity has reached 497 BTC, a 12% increase compared to a month ago.
There are some companies in the space that are trying to make the process of setting up a Lightning Node in a much easier way. Nevertheless, it might take longer for individuals that are not tech savvy to connect to the Lightning Network.
