Author: Jaleel, Luccy, BlockBeats

Editor: Jack, BlockBeats

In the crypto space, "legitimacy" has become one of the most frequently used terms in the past two years. Although this term originated from Ethereum (Vitalik wrote a blog post titled "Legitimacy is the Scarcest Resource in the Crypto Ecosystem" in March 2021, explaining the concept of legitimacy), it is also present in the Bitcoin community. For most people, the "child of legitimacy" in the Bitcoin community is the Lightning Network.

As the concept of the "Bitcoin ecosystem" gains momentum, various Bitcoin scaling solutions such as sidechains and virtual machines have entered the investors' sights, but the mainstream view of the market seems to still regard the Lightning Network as merely a "payment channel." With the continued development of the Bitcoin ecosystem, the Lightning Network is beginning to face "transformation pressure." This article outlines the origins of the Lightning Network, its two main development entities, and explains the current dilemmas it faces and its future development directions.

Satoshi's Emails

When mentioning Bitcoin, the Lightning Network is undoubtedly an unavoidable keyword.

In earlier years, the public had little understanding of Bitcoin, and there were not many evangelists for Bitcoin, so directly asking Satoshi was the only way to get clear answers. In 2011, software developer Mike Hearn, while serving as a senior software engineer and technical lead at Google, also devoted much of his energy to Bitcoin development. During his approximately five years of Bitcoin development, Mike Hearn engaged in various conversations with Satoshi via email, which he later published as a historically significant document on his blog.

On March 7, 2011, Mike Hearn had just released BitCoinJ (an open-source Bitcoin client library built using Java and implementing the Bitcoin network protocol) under the Apache 2 license on behalf of Google, and was preparing to complete the implementation of the full client mode in the next month or two.

He emailed Satoshi, asking: "I still don't fully understand why the sequence number is an attribute of the TX input rather than the TX itself?"

In response, Satoshi replied: "Intermediate transaction matters do not need to be broadcast; only the final result will be recorded by the network. Just before nLockTime, parties and some witness nodes broadcast the highest sequence tx they see." This is Satoshi's explanation of payment channels, which is also the embryonic form of the Lightning Network and the birth of its legitimacy.

If we trace back further, Bitcoin 0.1 included a code draft that allowed users to update a transaction before it was confirmed by the network.

Payment channel draft included in Bitcoin 0.1. Source: GitHub

Lightning Network Representatives: Blockstream and Lightning Labs

The design of payment channels and networks has evolved over many years, becoming clearer with the release of the Bitcoin Lightning Network white paper in early 2015. Unexpectedly, in the months following, the disagreements over Bitcoin's scaling issues and block size limits evolved into public disputes throughout the spring and summer of 2015.

In December 2015, Gregory Maxwell (one of the founders of Blockstream) proposed a scaling roadmap in the Bitcoin developers' mailing list, which highlighted the Lightning Network. Most members of the Bitcoin technical community expressed support for this proposal to increase the capacity of the Bitcoin system and implemented it in the Bitcoin Core project. This sparked excitement for the Lightning Network. The subsequent scaling debate in Bitcoin unexpectedly pushed the Lightning Network into the spotlight.

"Bitcoin Giant" Blockstream

There seems to be a rumor in the community that Blockstream is the "voice" behind Bitcoin. This rumor is not unfounded.

On October 23, 2014, Blockstream, one of the most influential companies in building the Lightning Network, was founded. Adam Back, the inventor of hashcash, gathered several Bitcoin developers, including Matt Corallo, Greg Maxwell, and Pieter Wuille, to establish Blockstream and released their sidechain white paper.

Since its inception, Blockstream has been a pioneer in developing the Lightning Network. As the founder of Blockstream, Adam Back's influence is not to be underestimated. In a foreign "cryptocurrency" influence ranking, Adam Back ranked fourth, with the top three being: Andreas Antonopoulos (early Bitcoin evangelist), Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum founder), and Nick Szabo (the proposer of the "smart contract" concept).

Foreign "cryptocurrency" influence ranking

The reason for Adam Back's significant influence can be traced back to 1997. At that time, the internet was just emerging, and email was considered the first application for people to communicate. However, the overwhelming amount of spam began to trouble people, leading many to try to find solutions. Adam Back published an email titled "A partial hash collision based postage scheme," in which he introduced Hashcash, a mechanism that uses a technique called proof of work to prevent spam. Therefore, Adam Back is often referred to as the "father of PoW."

All of this gained him recognition because Satoshi mentioned Adam Back's "Hashcash" in the Bitcoin white paper, gradually establishing his strong position in the crypto industry.

Among the founding members and key contributors of Blockstream, there are also crucial members of the Bitcoin development team, such as Greg Maxwell and Pieter Wuille.

Greg Maxwell, a renowned cryptographer and software engineer, has made significant contributions to Bitcoin's privacy and scalability. For example, he contributed to homomorphic key derivation used in BIP32, as well as trustless privacy protection technologies like CoinJoin and blind signatures. Pieter Wuille has been a Bitcoin Core developer since May 2011. In 2012, Wuille released BIP 32, adding hierarchical deterministic wallets to Bitcoin, and participated in the development of key technologies such as Segregated Witness (SegWit).

Although theoretically anyone can contribute code to the BTC Core project, only those with commit access can merge that code into the actual BTC protocol. Pieter Wuille was one of only five people who had access to submit BTC code repositories at that time and was the person who contributed the most code to the BTC project after Satoshi.

As discussions about scaling in the Bitcoin community heated up in 2015, a paper from ETH Zurich titled "A Fast and Scalable Payment Network with Bitcoin Duplex Micropayment Channels" was published in late 2015. The solution proposed in this paper heavily relied on time locks as a "countdown device" for channel validity, as well as a cryptographic technique called "invalid trees" to invalidate outdated channel transactions. This became the technological prototype that the Lightning Network would later rely on. Both authors of this paper, Christian Decker and Roger Wattenhofer, later joined Blockstream.

Unexpectedly, in the months following, the disagreements over Bitcoin's scaling issues and block size limits evolved into public disputes throughout the spring and summer of 2015. On August 15, 2015, two early Bitcoin technical pioneers, Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn, jointly announced in a blog that their new version of BitcoinXT would implement the BIP-101 proposal without requiring a miner vote, activating it directly. This day later became known as the "day the block size war broke out," during which Blockstream made significant contributions to promoting the Lightning Network.

In December 2015, Gregory Maxwell (one of the founders of Blockstream) proposed a scaling roadmap in the Bitcoin developers' mailing list, which highlighted the Lightning Network. Most members of the Bitcoin technical community expressed support for this proposal to increase the capacity of the Bitcoin system and implemented it in the Bitcoin Core project. This sparked excitement for the Lightning Network.

At that time, there were two completely different views regarding the controversy between the Bitcoin Core development team and Bitmain.

On one hand, supporters of Bitmain believed that the Bitcoin Core development team was a group of stubborn programmers who clung to the original Bitcoin core, refusing to make necessary changes and adaptations. They believed these developers were immersed in their own technical world, ignoring the true needs of Bitcoin's development, and were the "old folks" hindering progress. On the other hand, supporters of the Bitcoin Core development team believed that Bitmain was deliberately distorting facts and misleading the public and miners by leveraging its influence and information advantage in the industry.

Adam Back, co-founder of Blockstream, represented Bitcoin developers and acted as a mediator between both sides, attending the Consensus conference in Hong Kong. As one of the earliest blockchain development companies, Blockstream not only had personnel overlap with Bitcoin Core but also funded their development work. The signature of Blockstream CEO Adam Back led everyone to believe that the developers agreed to the Hong Kong Consensus.

However, after the meeting, Bitcoin Core stated that all the developers who promised various changes at the meeting were programmers without Core source code modification permissions. None of the five people with the right to modify the Core source code attended, nor did they sign.

Adam Back also stated that his signature at the meeting only represented himself and could not represent Bitcoin Core's agreement to the Hong Kong Consensus. His attitude turned 180 degrees, strongly opposing the Hong Kong Consensus he had just signed. The Hong Kong Consensus was rejected by Bitcoin Core, but during the same period, the Lightning Network gained a consensus of "legitimacy" from Bitcoin developers.

In the summer of 2017, Segregated Witness was activated on the Bitcoin blockchain, paving the way for the implementation of the Lightning Network. It can be said that Greg Maxwell and Pieter Wuille played a crucial role in upgrading the Bitcoin network—especially in the introduction of Segregated Witness (SegWit) and the development of the Lightning Network.

Due to Blockstream employing many Bitcoin Core developers, Blockstream has significant influence in Bitcoin development, attracting much criticism. For example, some say Blockstream effectively controls Bitcoin development (some even claim Blockstream uses bots in the Bitcoin community to suppress dissenters and control public opinion). According to Whale Calls' analysis, 12%-20% of updates to the Bitcoin code come from Blockstream developers.

A few years ago, most analyses of Adam Back in the community suggested that he wanted to profit from Bitcoin. This is because Blockstream's business model is to sell sidechain/Lightning Network product services; if block expansion occurs, sidechains/Lightning Network would become useless, and as a profit-oriented company, Blockstream would not be able to generate revenue.

Lightning Labs: The Lightning Network White Paper Authors Go Separate Ways

The greatest legitimacy of Lightning Labs may come from its founders, who are the authors of the Lightning Network white paper, Joseph Poon and Tadge Dryja.

In the fall of 2015, this San Francisco-based startup, led by Elizabeth Stark, gathered the two co-authors of the Lightning Network white paper, Joseph Poon and Tadge Dryja, to start a business, standing alongside Blockstream. The biggest difference between the two is that Lightning Labs uses the Go programming language, while Blockstream uses the C programming language.

Lightning Labs not only made key contributions to the theoretical foundation of the Lightning Network but also released the beta version of the Lightning Network in March 2018, marking an important milestone in the development of the Lightning Network.

The early team at Lightning Labs was not at all inferior compared to Blockstream.

Before writing the Lightning Network white paper, Dryja founded a peer-to-peer trading system called mirro, and also introduced the concept of prediction markets, while also researching a PoW algorithm called Hashimoto, which is the predecessor of the Dagger Hashimoto algorithm, the latter being an alternative algorithm before Ethereum's PoW algorithm ethash went live.

In addition to Dryja, the other author of the Lightning Network white paper, Poon, is also a top developer in the crypto industry. For example, the recently published Plasma, which Vitalik supports returning to, is a layer two scaling technology for Ethereum that he and Poon jointly launched in 2017, making them a powerful duo dedicated to scalability projects. Poon also worked on a project called Handshake, which inherited the ideas of Namecoin.

Elizabeth Stark, as the co-founder and CEO of Lightning Labs, is well-known in the cryptocurrency and open internet fields, being a prominent entrepreneur and educator with significant influence in the Bitcoin community.

Olaoluwa Osuntokun (Roasbeef) is another co-founder of Lightning Labs and an outstanding Bitcoin developer who has made significant contributions to the development of the Lightning Network. He developed the LBD protocol based on the lit protocol, gaining recognition from more developers.

Among the engineers at Lightning Labs, Alex Akselrod is noteworthy. Four months before the release of the Lightning Network white paper, Alex Akselrod proposed the idea of bidirectional payment channels for the first time. The core idea was to introduce decreasing time locks, allowing the receiver to send funds to the sender a limited number of times. Alex Bosworth paid his phone bill through a Lightning channel established with Bitrefill, creating the first transaction on the Lightning Network.

Image source: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=814770.msg9185225#msg9185225

However, at the end of 2016, just a year after this Lightning Network company was founded, the two authors of the Lightning Network white paper split due to a "dispute."

While working at Lightning Labs, Dryja developed the first version of the protocol called LIT, which was not compatible with the BOLT developed by Blockstream, but the LND protocol developed by Lightning Labs' CTO Olaoluwa was compatible with BOLT and gradually gained more developer recognition, allowing it to surpass its predecessor.

As a result, Lightning Labs decided to focus on LND, while Dryja chose to leave Lightning Labs and join the research community at MIT Media Lab to continue developing Lit. Interestingly, this research community also employed top Bitcoin Core developers like Wladimir van der Laan and several Bitcoin Core contributors.

Thus, the two authors of the Lightning Network white paper, Joseph Poon and Tadge Dryja, went their separate ways.

Although Lightning Labs lost Tadge Dryja, it gained the support of Jack Dorsey. After leaving Twitter, Jack Dorsey actively promoted Bitcoin and the Lightning Network through his company Block Inc. (formerly Square Inc.).

In 2018, Dorsey participated in the seed round financing of Lightning Labs, and in 2022, he participated in the $10 million Series A financing of Lightning Labs, aimed at supporting its efforts to build a Bitcoin Visa network. It can be said that a series of developments and advancements by Lightning Labs are closely related to former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.

Subsequently, Square's Square Crypto project was renamed Spiral, which developed the Lightning Development Kit (LDK), enabling developers to integrate Lightning Network transactions into mobile devices and point-of-sale systems. Additionally, Square launched the Cash App mobile payment solution, which integrated the Lightning Network.

In addition to Jack Dorsey, notable investors and institutions in Lightning Labs include: Digital Currency Group; Robinhood; Ripple's investment department Xpring; former global co-founder Howard Morgan; Goldman Sachs securities department head John Pfeffer (former KKR member) and Forbes 30 Under 30 celebrity Jill Carlson.

Afterward, the protocols and applications related to the Lightning Network gradually became richer, such as the enhanced version of the BOLT protocol—OmniBOLT, and payment platforms like Cash App and Strike that support the Bitcoin Lightning Network.

Although multiple teams began developing the Lightning Network, the contributions of Blockstream and Lightning Labs are the most significant. Their roles in the evolution of the Lightning Network's legitimacy cannot be overlooked.

With the promotion of Blockstream and Lightning Labs, during those years, there were only two types of Bitcoin scaling solutions: one was the Lightning Network, and the other was everything else.

The Crossroads of the Lightning Network

Although it has had absolute legitimacy over the years, it is evident that in the past year, voices denying the Lightning Network have been increasing, especially among some senior developers.

"The Lightning Network has been deceiving Bitcoin users for their time, energy, and money for six years," said Fiatjaf, the founder of Nostr. It can be said that in the past two months, the debate about the Bitcoin Lightning Network has intensified. Recently, at least two developers have announced their withdrawal from work related to the Lightning Network.

Continuous Developer Exodus

On October 16, Lightning Network security researcher and developer Antoine Riard, in an email, delved into the risks of fund loss faced by Lightning Network channels, which are primarily caused by transaction pool replacement cycle attack issues. He specifically mentioned a type of transaction relay interference attack affecting Lightning Network channels, which is entirely possible in practice, even without network transaction pool congestion.

At the same time, Riard stated that he would stop participating in the development of the Lightning Network from now on, as this new replacement cycle attack would put the Lightning Network in a very dangerous position. However, from an optimistic perspective, this attack has great complexity and is not easy to implement.

Two weeks after Antoine Riard announced his departure, on October 30, the developer of the first mobile Lightning wallet, Anton Kumaigorodski, also announced his departure on Nostr. Anton Kumaigorodski is the developer of the Bitcoin Lightning Wallet (BLW) and Simple Bitcoin Wallet (SBW), and he also developed the Scala IMMORTAN library, which allows building mobile-optimized applications on top of the Lightning Network client. Contrary to many critics of the Lightning Network, he is fully aware of why LN as a technology remains challenging. His three reasons for leaving are:

1. Serious Lightning Network development is both difficult and time-consuming; the entire Lightning Network protocol is overly complex and increasingly problematic, and at this point, only a very few well-known experts can develop at a very slow pace. Philosophically, I believe that Bitcoin as a protocol should have a complexity barrier so that it does not exceed the point where outsiders cannot understand and trust it; I believe the Lightning Network has passed this barrier.

2. After more than six years of struggle, the Lightning Network has surpassed a community primarily composed of ideological users, without apparent success or viewpoints. My view is that ultimately, the Lightning Network is not what the entire market expects from Bitcoin; besides trivial payments, people should look for other directions rather than overly focusing on the Lightning Network.

3. The remaining demand for the Lightning Network is mainly absorbed by various custodial solutions. In terms of user experience, a truly non-custodial Lightning Network wallet is always worse than a custodial wallet; historically, we have seen that most remaining users always choose convenience over control. This makes developing a non-custodial Lightning Network solution for end users feel like the most thankless task in the world.

Bitcoin researcher and developer Robin Linus, after gaining significant attention following the publication of his "BitVM" paper, added: "It's time to admit that we have been overselling the Lightning Network to each other, which may be a form of post-traumatic stress disorder after the block size war. It's time to overcome it. The Lightning Network does not work for the masses."

River CEO and CTO Alexander Leishman also pointed out the user experience (UX) challenges of self-custody for consumers in the Lightning Network, stating, "The Lightning Network is very suitable for custodial to custodial transfers. The Lightning Network poses significant user experience challenges for consumers' self-custody." He emphasized the difficulties ordinary users face when managing their Lightning Network transactions.

In fact, during the early development stages of the Lightning Network, its potential scalability limitations were already evident, as mentioned in the Lightning Network white paper, particularly regarding the potential constraints on the scalability of the Lightning Network due to future soft forks that may not receive support.

In this context, what plans do the two main Lightning Network companies, Blockstream and Lightning Labs, have?

Pressure from Sidechains

In addition to the Lightning Network, Blockstream's focus in recent years has been on the sidechain product Liquid Network.

In 2014, Adam Back, Matt Corallo, and Luke-Jr co-authored a paper titled "Enabling Blockchain Innovations with Pegged Sidechains." This paper first publicly proposed the idea of promoting blockchain innovation through pegged sidechains.

On October 12, 2015, Blockstream announced the release of its Liquid sidechain prototype, which allowed the transfer of assets between the Liquid sidechain and the Bitcoin main chain. On October 11, 2018, the production-ready implementation of the Liquid sidechain was officially launched, called Liquid Network, aimed at facilitating interoperability between the Bitcoin main chain and the Liquid sidechain to expand Bitcoin's functionality.

The sidechain born from Adam Back's paper is not just Liquid; there is also Drivechain.

In a blog post in 2015, LayerTwoLabs co-founder Paul Sztorc further introduced the concept of Drivechain, proposing it as a method to avoid hard forks caused by consensus disagreements, thus preventing the fragmentation of Bitcoin. Drivechain introduced an innovative way for Bitcoin, allowing the creation and deletion of sidechains, as well as sending and receiving BTC on the so-called "second layer"—the sidechain. Bitcoin and Drivechain form a parent-child chain relationship, with Bitcoin as the parent and Drivechain as the child, so Drivechain itself does not issue a native token. Instead, it relies entirely on BTC transferred from the Bitcoin network.

Drivechains are created and rely on the concept of blind merged mining, allowing miners on the Bitcoin blockchain (parent) to mine on Drivechain (child) without running a full Drivechain node, and miners are paid in BTC. Paul Sztorc proposed Bitcoin Improvement Proposals BIP 300 and 301 in 2017, allowing the creation of sidechains associated with the Bitcoin mainnet but operating independently, with different rules and functionalities.

Adam Back praised this form of sidechain: "Kudos to Paul Sztorc and his team for realizing and validating the Drivechain design." He also stated that Drivechains are cool and could be considered more important or useful than Taproot. He mentioned, "I think we will need a large P2P sidechain to allow the next billion users to benefit from unseizable, censorship-resistant #bitcoin. Supporting opcodes for P2P sidechains, like LayerTwoLabs doing Drivechain, P2P Liquidium, and Rootstock."

It is worth mentioning that LayerTwoLabs was co-founded by Yale economist Paul Sztorc, along with Bitcoin developers CryptAxe (2016-present) and Luke Dashjr (2012-present). Luke Dashjr is the Bitcoin Core developer who recently criticized Bitcoin inscriptions; he submitted a PR for BIP 300 to the Bitcoin Core GitHub code repository on August 22, and the Bitcoin Core community began reviewing the Drivechain-related code.

LayerTwoLabs aims to promote significant Bitcoin upgrade proposals BIP 300 and BIP 301, enabling Bitcoin to achieve high scalability, privacy, and better UX experience through Drivechain, while supporting the development of various sidechains, aiming to bring decentralized applications and other extended functionalities of blockchain into the Bitcoin ecosystem for the long-term healthy development of Bitcoin. LayerTwoLabs has completed a $4 million angel round of financing and is currently conducting the next round of financing.

Notable figures mentioned earlier, such as BitVM inventor Robin Linus, Nostr founder Fiatjaf, and Anton Kumaigorodski, have also expressed varying degrees of support for Drivechain while "putting down" the Lightning Network.

Although it has received support from many Bitcoin OGs, there may still be a long way to go before it can pass through BIP proposals and achieve large-scale applications. "Optimistically, it may take one or two years; pessimistically, it may take three to four years," said Mike Yeung, an investor and Asia regional head of the Drivechain development team LayerTwoLabs, to BlockBeats. Launching Drivechain is undoubtedly a daunting task, but LayerTwo Labs has some plans and strategies to accelerate the adoption of Drivechain technology.

From Mike Yeung's perspective, there are some security vulnerabilities in the Lightning Network from a technical standpoint. Secondly, the Lightning Network does not benefit miners; in fact, the relationship between the Lightning Network and miners is not good. As for the possibility of the Lightning Network as a scaling tool, "I think it is actually impossible because it cannot achieve smart contracts, and what it can do is very limited. I don't think the Lightning Network will completely fail, but its prospects are not optimistic."

"Since 2017, countless investors, including individual investors, family offices, and venture capitalists, have invested in the Lightning Network, and they cannot let their investments go to zero," Mike Yeung told BlockBeats. Meanwhile, some influential figures, including the former CEO of Twitter and the leadership of MicroStrategy, have closely tied their public image and PR strategies to the Lightning Network brand. Due to their previous public support and the nature of their companies, they find it difficult to easily retract their previous statements. This has led them to continue promoting the advantages of the Lightning Network, even though they recognize its limitations and that it may not be the ultimate solution to Bitcoin's scaling issues.

Attempting to Break Through

Blockstream focuses on main sidechain research, while Taproot Assets aims to develop Lightning Labs into a multi-asset network.

Taproot Assets is a CSV asset protocol based on Taproot, used for issuing assets on the Bitcoin blockchain. These assets can be traded instantly, in large volumes, and at low costs via the Lightning Network. The core of Taproot Assets is to leverage Bitcoin's security and stability, along with the speed, scalability, and low cost of the Lightning Network.

This idea began in 2021 when the Lightning Labs team discovered that Bitcoin received national-level applications in El Salvador through the Lightning Network. This made Lightning Labs CEO Elizabeth Stark realize that the focus of people's attention was gradually shifting from Bitcoin assets to Bitcoin's monetary network. Thus, the team began to conceive a multi-asset network aimed at expanding the global influence of Bitcoin and Lightning.

In September 2022, Lightning Labs released the initial Taro protocol code and announced it had secured $70 million in financing. Later, due to accusations from blockchain startup Tari Labs that the Taro name was similar to its own trademark and provided similar services, Taro was renamed Taproot Assets.

The reason Lightning Labs designed a brand new protocol was, on one hand, to avoid blockchain congestion, which was also the original intention of Taro's design. It is closely integrated with the Lightning Network, allowing assets to be stored and transferred within Lightning channels, thus enabling instant, low-cost transactions. On the other hand, it considers the "overwhelming" demand for stablecoins and Lightning Labs' goal of "dollarizing Bitcoin."

As Taproot Assets uses Bitcoin liquidity to route assets issued on the protocol, the demand for Bitcoin on the Lightning Network will increase. Therefore, Bitcoin will circulate dollars, fiat currencies, and everything in between, achieving the dollarization of Bitcoin. The ultimate goal of the Lightning Network is very clear: after the release of Taproot Assets, it will focus on developing into a multi-asset network.

In the past few months of testnet development, early adopters and the team have iterated continuously, minting nearly 2,000 assets on the testnet, exploring stablecoins, collectibles, and the potential of RWA assets, and synchronizing their nodes with the Universe server, which is a repository that stores all the information needed to initialize wallets and download wallet states.

Taproot Assets is designed and developed by Olaoluwa Osuntokun, co-founder and CTO of Lightning Labs. Olaoluwa Osuntokun is one of the main developers of the Lightning Network client LND and a contributor to the Bitcoin client (BTCD), being one of the few developers who have worked on both the Lightning Network and Bitcoin clients, possessing a deep understanding of Bitcoin.

The Entrepreneurial Spirit of Bitcoin

Unlike Ethereum, Bitcoin's "rigidity" is the foundation of its legitimacy. This "rigidity" culture emphasizes decentralization, freedom, security, and privacy, but it has also fostered a fair and diverse cultural and technical community.

"If you have attended Bitcoin and Lightning Network conferences, it is easy to notice the differences between the two communities."

This is Antoine Riard's evaluation of the Bitcoin developer community in his blog. Bitcoin conferences (mainly for Bitcoin Core) typically focus on in-depth technical discussions, emphasizing security and protocol engineering, with participants including experienced internet users, various hackers, and civil libertarians. After experiencing countless scams, they naturally hold a skeptical attitude, but intellectual debates remain open and honest.

In contrast, the crowd at Lightning Network events feels different. They tend to be younger and more entrepreneurial, with discussions focusing more on user experience and product design. The venue is vibrant, with many dazzling Lightning applications for everyone to experience, and the influence of Silicon Valley is evident here. This is also reflected in the activities of passing the Lightning Torch.

Compared to Bitcoin Core, the Lightning Network places greater emphasis on innovation, practicality, and a spirit of community collaboration. This cultural difference reflects the diversity and complexity of the Bitcoin ecosystem, while also being a source of its charm and vitality.

In the new context of the "Bitcoin ecosystem," inscriptions and memes are flying, but when the tide goes out, what remains of this ecosystem? The author believes that Bitcoin's culture, along with more entrepreneurial communities and teams, will become a valuable asset for the development of the Bitcoin network.

Author's Note: This article attempts to summarize the origin story of the Lightning Network and its current impact, but the history of the Lightning Network is much richer than I know, and putting them all into a single article structure requires omitting many details, which cannot reflect all the people, projects, and concepts that helped realize this technology. It is best to regard this article as a rough summary rather than a detailed history and technical explanation. Thanks to every friend who provided information and other feedback.