A brief history of the Lightning Network

The Bitcoin community has long been baffled by the scalability issue. The speed of transactions fell, and the network fees grew. In 2015 Thaddeus Dria and Joseph Poon proposed a solution called the Lightning Network. The idea was to carry out some of the transactions outside the network, thereby reducing the load on the BTC blockchain. In 2018, the Lightning Network was launched in Bitcoin.

The Lightning Network is a system that helps users move funds among themselves without having to use a blockchain to verify a transaction. Instead, there is a quick check of funds from the sender and a request from the recipient who agrees to the transaction.

Problems that may arise when sending Lightning Network

1. If an error occurs when you try to send the Lightning Network, then most likely it happened due to the lack of channels. The Lightning Network requires links between nodes. If your wallet allows you to open channels yourself, then you can open a channel with FixedFloat.
   FixedFloat Node:
   037f990e61acee8a7697966afd29dd88f3b1f8a7b14d625c4f8742bd952003a590@lnd.fixedfloat.com:9735
   
   For more information on how to do this, see our article "How to start using the Lightning Network?".
2. If you see a "Payment in transit" message when sending the Lightning Network, it means the Lightning Network has been sent, but there is a problem with intermediate nodes. You need to wait for the final invoice payment or refund.

Lightning Network Speed and Fees

Since transactions on the Lightning Network do not end up on the blockchain, they are almost instantaneous. But if one of the intermediate nodes is off the network, the transaction may be delayed.

The fee depends on the intermediate channels through which the payment passes. Usually it is almost zero. But it so happens that some channels charge a high fee for passing the payment. It can reach up to 1% of the amount.

When will Bitcoin be credited to your wallet?

We send Bitcoin immediately after the exchange is completed, but the time before the first confirmation depends on several parameters:

1. Commissions. In our exchanger miner fee is set so that the transaction was one of the first.
2. Frequency of occurrence of blocks. Blocks in the Bitcoin network appear on average every 10 minutes, but it happens that a new block does not appear for an hour or more. In this case, the Commission may lose its relevance and the transaction may go a little longer than planned.

How to estimate the confirmation time of the transaction?

There are several ways to estimate the time of confirmation of the transaction, but you need to understand that it is impossible to calculate it accurately since many factors affect the passage of your transaction, you can read more in our article.

• The easiest way to find out when the first confirmation of the network is to go in the service of collecting statistics from BitcoinFees Earn.com there you can see when your transaction gets into a block, depending on the fee which you sent it.

• You can also use the Explorer Blockchair.com where you can see the priority of the transaction. The first number is what place in the queue is a transaction, the second how many transactions are pending (e.g. priority 1676/9495). Each block includes approximately 2500 transactions, we see that our transaction is in 1676 place in the queue, and therefore must pass in the next block.

It is important to note that to increase the number of confirmations, a new block must appear, blocks in bitcoin can go from 1 to 75 minutes. The average time of Bitcoin block appearance is 10 minutes.

You can read more in our article about the confirmation time in the Bitcoin network.

When can I spend the funds received?

• If you request funds for a personal Bitcoin wallet, you can dispose of them immediately after one confirmation of the network.
• If funds are sent to an exchange or other services where there is a need for multiple confirmations, then you will need to wait until the transaction receives the required number of confirmations.

How does the number of confirmations in the Bitcoin network increase?

After the first confirmation, they will only grow with newly mined blocks. If there is no next block for a long time, then the number of confirmations up to this point will remain unchanged.