'I'm Freaking Out': How It Feels to Hold the Bitcoin Lightning Torch

"Hey are you set up with lightning? To send and receive lightning payments?".

The day I held the Lightning Torch was the day I learned how the lightning network works.

The Lightning Network Torch - better known by the Twitter hashtag #LNTorch - is a symbolic transaction, meant to teach how this new form of payment lets you send bitcoin faster and without paying fees on the blockchain every time.

To receive the payment, I first needed to download a wallet that worked with Lightning Network.

Something to take into account is that funding a Lightning wallet can take hours.

While the payment itself is very quick, it took Jill two hours to send the funds to my lightning wallet and another six hours for me to transfer them to the next person.

While transactions fees are supposed to be practically nonexistent, in reality, various users have complained about losing money while sending transactions using BlueWallet, one of the most commonly used wallets with lightning network integrated.

The lightning fees are supposed to be below 100 satoshis, and I had an extra 300,000 satoshis available to make the payment.

For someone who has never used the Lightning Network before, this was a quite contrasting experience with more established bitcoin wallets, and definitely more stressful.

The Lightning Torch has reached to 250 participants in 53 countries, going from 0.0001 BTC to 0.0395 BTC at press time.