Rather than wait hours for dozens of
$3 coffee transactions to be confirmed
on the blockchain, a coffee shop can offer
customers a Lightning Network channel,
for a pre-committed amount of funds, say a
week or month’s worth of coffee.
This channel incurs the normal
network fee, but its users can do as many
transactions within it as they want, for no
extra cost, and almost instantly.
Why not just buy a $90 monthly coffee
subscription? Because the Lightning
Network allows users to contest
transactions. If a customer think the shop
charged them for two coffees instead of
one, they can send a code that demands the
coffee shop sort out the problem or forfeit
the value of one coffee back to the customer.
More importantly than this though,
Lightning Network should restore Bitcoin’s
capacity to handle small, near-instant
transactions between people oceans apart.
The average network fee, in March 2018, to
send any amount of Bitcoin on the network, in
USD. Network costs are paid to miners, in
Bitcoin, and are calculated not on how much
Bitcoin is being moved, but rather on the ile
size of the transaction, and how quickly the
sender wants the transaction conirmed.
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