Blockchain Bibliotheca

Mastering the Lightning Network: A Second Layer Blockchain Protocol for Instant Bitcoin Payments

The Lightning Network (LN) is a rapidly growing second-layer payment protocol that works on top of Bitcoin to provide near-instantaneous transactions between two parties. With this practical guide, authors Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Olaoluwa Osuntokun, and Rene Pickhardt explain how this advancement will enable the next level of scale for Bitcoin, increasing speed and privacy while reducing fees.

Ideal for developers, systems architects, investors, and entrepreneurs looking to gain a better understanding of LN, this book demonstrates why experts consider LN a critical solution to Bitcoin's scalability problem. You'll learn how LN has the potential to support far more transactions than today's financial networks.

Mastering the Lightning Network: A Second Layer Blockchain Protocol for Instant Bitcoin Payments
Andreas M. Antonopoulos

The Authors

Andreas M. Antonopoulos

Andreas M. Antonopoulos is an acclaimed author, speaker, educator, and one of the world’s foremost bitcoin and open blockchain experts. Andreas makes complex subjects accessible and easy to understand. He is known for delivering electric talks that combine economics, psychology, technology, and game theory with current events, personal anecdote, and historical precedent—effortlessly transliterating the complex issues of blockchain technology out of the abstract and into the real world. In 2014, Antonopoulos authored the groundbreaking book, Mastering Bitcoin, widely considered to be the best technical guide ever written about the technology. His second book, The Internet of Money, unveiled the “why” of bitcoin—and became a bestseller on Amazon as did the follow up books The Internet of Money Volume Two, and The Internet of Money Volume Three. Mastering Ethereum, a technical guide to the Ethereum network, was published in late 2018. His most recent book Mastering the Lightning Network explains Bitcoin's second layer payment network. His books have been translated and published in 14 languages so far. He is a teaching fellow with the University of Nicosia, serves on the Oversight Committee for the Bitcoin Reference Rate at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and has appeared as an expert witness in hearings around the world, including the Australian Senate Banking Committee and the Canadian Senate Commerce, Banking and Finance Committee. As an entrepreneur, Andreas has founded a number of bitcoin businesses and launched several community open-source projects. He serves as an advisor to several bitcoin and crypto-currency companies. He is a widely published author of articles and blog posts on bitcoin, is a permanent host on the popular Speaking of Bitcoin Podcast, and a frequent speaker at technology and security conferences and meetups worldwide. Andreas can be contacted via twitter (@aantonop) or via the contact forms on his website aantonop.com

Olaoluwa Osuntokun

Olaoluwa Osuntokun

Olaoluwa Osuntokun is the co-founder and CTO of Lightning Labs, and also the lead developer of lnd, one of the main implementations of Lightning. He received his B.S and M.S in Computer Science from UCSB and was a member of the Forbes 30 Under 30 class of 2019. During his graduate studies he focused on the field of applied cryptography, specifically encrypted search. He has been an active Bitcoin developer for over 7 years, and is an author of several Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIP 157+158). These days, his primary focus lies in building, designing, and evolving private, scalable off-chain blockchain protocols, such as Lightning.

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