I'm sure that in 20 years there will either be very large transaction volume or no volume. Satoshi Nakamoto, on Bitcoin transaction throughput

SMS Privacy now accepts Lightning Network payments

5th Sep 2018

The Lightning Network is a second-layer payment protocol operating on top of Bitcoin. It uses a network of payment channels to provide near-instant, near-free, trustless Bitcoin payments.

Lightning Network is still considered very experimental, but we're recklessly running it on mainnet anyway. And if you are too, you can now pay us using Lightning Network. (If you're logged in, click here).

Despite this experimental nature, the total capacity of all the publicly-advertised payment channels just passed 100 BTC yesterday. In other words, that is at least 100 Bitcoins (or $700,000) that real people have entrusted to Lightning Network software. Remarkable.

At SMS Privacy, we're doing this tentatively for now. If something goes drastically wrong we're likely to disable it until the problem is rectified. Hopefully that doesn't happen. I am willing to assert that no customer will lose money because of Lightning Network issues. If you have a problem, please contact support@smsprivacy.org and I will resolve the problem. In the event that there is some Lightning Network issue and your money has disappeared from your hands but not appeared in my hands, I will just credit you with the balance anyway. So don't be shy. Send lots of millisatoshis :).

And of course, we're still accepting 0-conf on-chain payments as before.

Good luck everyone.

If you have any questions or comments, please email support@smsprivacy.org. I want to hear from you. Specifically, if you need help, I'm more than happy to walk you through setting up a Lightning wallet or answer other Lightning Network-related questions.

Cheers,

James Stanley

SMS Privacy