Today is a good day for Bitcoin, Lightning Network just announced that their beta is ready to go live on the main network. Lightning on Bitcoin is a second layer p2p scaling solution that uses smart contract functionality and payment channels to solve a lot of Bitcoin’s current problems. Users can send and receive instant transaction when utilizing the technology, while also enjoying low fees and a scalable network. LN is capable of scaling to millions of transaction per second, it all depends on the number of nodes present on it.

A lot of critics where questioning the state of the technology recently, some even stated that it is vaporware. Specially places like r/btc (an alternative bitcoin subreddit led by Roger Ver), were not very welcoming towards the technology. Most users there argue that the only secure way for scaling currently is raising the blocksize and more often call Bitcoin Cash’s transactions ‘instant’.

Now LN seems to be in a hurry to prove all the haters wrong, the current release is the fourth major release and it targets technical users and service providers. This update features support for the Bitcoin Core client, vastly improved fault-tolerance, smarter path-finding, automated contract resolution and a lot more.

The blog post also features a roadmap, users can look forward to: desktop and mobile apps, routing node tools and guides, cross-chain atomic swaps and a few other goodies.

Some of the prominent investors of Lightning Labs (the creators of LN) include: Jack Dorsey (CEO of Square, Twitter), David Sacks (formerly COO of PayPal) and Bill Lee (angel investor in Tesla, SpaceX).

We welcome this feature on the Bitcoin network and are looking forward on how this develops in the future!