Altcoin News: Lightning Torch Transaction Reaches Iran Despite Sanctions

March 4, 2019, by Marko Vidrih on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE

The Lightning Torch Relay transaction using Bitcoin and the Lightning Network was transferred to Iran several days after complaints of censorship among the initiative’s participants.

The Lightning Torch Relay, in which Bitcoin users exchange transactions in the Lightning Network, add funds and send them on, is becoming increasingly popular. After the launch of the initiative in January of this year, in February, it was supported by the CEO of Twitter and many other popular personalities. Already more than 230 people have participated in the transaction.

Despite the fact that the project was intended to prove the boundless decentralized advantages of both Bitcoin and the Lightning Network, last week the initiative was strongly criticized after one participant refused to send the transaction to the recipient in Iran.

The recipient was Coinex Executive Director Ziya Sadr, who received community support after being a senior software engineer for Peach Inc. and Vijay Boyapati, a US citizen, said that political problems make the transfer of a transaction to Iran “very risky” for him.

“Very sad that two peaceful people cannot transact with each other across the world because of the state,” Boyapati commented at the time.

Since then, however, other Torch members have teamed up to solve this problem, and Sadr has the opportunity to participate in a transaction. According to the project monitoring website, British Twitter user, Bitgeiniog transferred the transaction to Iran, after receiving payment from the Bitcoin Magazine news resource. Sadr subsequently transferred the transaction to another Iranian.

“Let’s keep the Censorship Resistance trend going,” he wrote, suggesting that the developers of the Tor web browser also take part in the relay.

Lightning Network itself also continues to develop in the Bitcoin blockchain. The resource statistics of 1ML.com confirms that in February the total network bandwidth increased by almost 20%, while the number of nodes and channels increased by 19% and 39%, respectively. Last month, it was also reported that the Lightning Torch initiative promoted the growth of the Lightning Network to 6,000 nodes.

Author: Marko Vidrih

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