Another day to remember for the cryptocurrency community. The first ever purchase has been done using lightning network. The transaction has been completed on January the 20th to buy a VPN Router through a payment channel linked to TorGuard.
Lightning Network – The Bitcoin Scaling Solution
Lightning network is the solution that the community is waiting in order to allow Bitcoin to scale. As the cryptocurrency space is receiving more investors and users, the different currencies are also suffering from the lack of scalability that some of them experience.
Usually, Ethereum has been used as a cheaper and faster option to Bitcoin to send and process payments. But the increased demand in this network with ICOs and other games like CryptoKitties, it has also shown the different problems it has in order to scale.
According to a Reddit user /u/btc_throwaway1337, he purchased a VPN Router through a payment channel provided by TorGuard. The transaction was performed when the user opened a channel and proceeded with the transaction without paying any fee.
The user commented about this achievement:
“I am just your average BTC enthusiast, who had a bit of extra time last weekend. I saw TorGuard’s tweet, so I decided to contact them. I enquired as to purchasing more than just a monthly subscription, their staff gave me LN peering information, I opened a channel, received an invoice, and here we are. It was all quick easy, painless and most importantly: instantaneous and fee-free!”
This is an important milestone for the Bitcoin community. It remembers the day in which the first Bitcoin purchase was made by a user named Laszlo Hanyecz. At that time, he paid 10,000 bitcoins for two pizzas.
The lightning network would allow bitcoin to receive more users, to process micropayments, reduce fees and make transactions almost instantaneous. In this way, Bitcoin may recover the use that it had before it received several users to its network, allowing individuals to process micro transactions in a few seconds with small fees.
