Christian Decker from Blockstream and the DLT staff from MainbornWolff will give us an introduction and deep-dive into the Lightning Network.



How should an internet-native money and cash look like? How to make it scale while remaining decentralized? How to achieve the capacity required to serve the daily transaction needs not only of every human on this planet, but also of the machines and automated processes of the future; that is, millions of transactions per second world-wide, with near-zero fees?



The Bitcoin community has been debating (to say the least) for the last 3 years, and even most of the harshest critics of the "small blockers" don't deny in principle that a so-called layer 2 is inevitable.



A blockchain fundamentally doesn't scale. It must run redundantly on thousands of computers world-wide in order to remain truly immutable and incorruptible. To chisel every single payment for a coffee into such a ledger system is thus far too heavy on resources.



Enter the Lightning Network. Turns out there is a way that Alice can be paid by Bob for a coffee without having to tell the world, while still being safe from double spending. How does that work? Tonight we will learn all about the clever solution that has been found for this problem.



Target Audience: We will have two parts. First we will address a general audience, later we will dive deeper into the matter, demonstrating how to set up and run a lightning node. We will probably also have an extended Q&A and discussion panel to talk about the future of scalability in blockchains, layer 2 solutions, the challenges, and potential further applications therein.



—



Our speakers tonight include:



Christian Decker, long-time researcher and developer for the Bitcoin Core protocol and layer 2 solutions, wrote the world's first PhD thesis that was entirely on Bitcoin in 2012 at the ETH Zurich Distributed Computing group, currently employed at Blockstream.



* https://twitter.com/snyke

* https://ch.linkedin.com/in/christiandecker

* https://disco.ethz.ch/alumni/cdecker

* https://snyke.net/

* https://blockstream.com/



Dirk Röder from the DLT department at MaibornWolff. Consultant, trainer, and speaker.



* https://twitter.com/droeder72

* https://de.linkedin.com/in/droeder72

* https://medium.com/@droeder72



Florian Maier, software architect at MaibornWolff, crypto-currency enthusiast and expert.



* https://twitter.com/Marsmensch

* https://de.linkedin.com/in/fmaier



* https://www.maibornwolff.de/



Diethelm Baumann, Lawyer



* http://www.weitnauer.net



—



Rough plan:



18:30 Doors open



18:45 Part I:



Welcome from your hosts



Dirk will provide us with an easy introduction in layman's terms to the Lightning Network, and with an orientation as to its meaning and position in the larger Blockchain ecosystem.



Diethelm with a short abstract on legal perspectives for those interested in running projects in the space



Our ̶M̶a̶s̶t̶e̶r̶n̶o̶d̶e̶LightningNode-Wunderkind Florian will show off a demo.



20:00 Break, food, networking, socializing



20:30 Part II:



Christian's lecture: "Beyond Blockchains — Making Blockchains scalable and private with off-chain protocols"



Q&A and discussions



22:00 End of official part, drinks, socializing



23:59 Curfew



Thanks very much to Innovator Space for hosting us this time! https://innovatorspace.de/



We will also host a "Hackday: Lightning Network" the next day, all day! https://www.meetup.com/Bitcoin-Munich/events/249959171/



This event is also part of the Münchner Webwoche. http://muenchner-webwoche.de/eventkalender/



(Our meetup group is organized by independent enthusiasts and not affiliated with venues, sponsors, or presenters of this or past events. Viewpoints expressed by our speakers do not necessarily represent our own. In particular, our program is not to be understood as investment advice.)



(Illustration taken from the https://explorer.acinq.co/ graph view)