Bitcoin Lightning Torch Payments are Becoming More Difficult to Send: Here’s Why That is Happening

The popular Lightning Torch initiative on Twitter might reach an end in the near future. It is becoming difficult to send it to other users.

The project was born in order to expand the knowledge about the Lightning Network (LN) and how it works in social media. Indeed, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey participated from it.

What is Happening With the Lightning Torch?

The process of passing the Lightning Torch from one person to another is becoming a more complicated issue as time passes. There are some users that when they try to send the torch to another individual, they cannot do it.

According to the Twitter user @BTChap, the Lightning Torch was designed as a social experiment and it turned into a stress test of channel liquidity. Users that send the Lightning Torch to another participant should increase the amount transacted.

#LNTrustChain was designed as a social experiment – but due to overwhelming success it turned into a stress test of channel liquidity #LightningNetwork pic.twitter.com/mVN4fA2NsV

— BTChap ☣️ (@BTChap) February 17, 2019

In order to use the Lightning Network, users should put money into a channel with another person. If users want to receive the Lightning Torch, they must have some money on the other side of the channel, which is called “incoming liquidity.”

In this way, the other user can send the funds. Nevertheless, it is becoming difficult to find this liquidity. This shouldn’t be an issue if the network expands and increases its liquidity.

The Lightning Torch now contains $150, which is quite big for the torch to keep going. The number of channels that provide enough liquidity for it became smaller and smaller, according to BTChap.

The Lightning developer Stadicus, explained that some users need incoming capacity to accept payments. Moreover, he said that there are some products, such as Bitrefill’s Thor, that tackle this issue.

On the matter, Stadicus commented:

“I just set up my Lightning node a day before and the one incoming channel I had was big enough but not well connected. So @meeDamian opened a channel to me and pushed the torch directly with that single Bitcoin transaction to my Lightning node.”

Hodlonaut, the Twitter user that started with the Lightning Torch initiative a few months ago, said that most passes of the torch worked and that the slower pace of the torch is due to other reasons.

Developers explain that the network is small and that liquidity issues were something expected to happen. Moreover, technologists believe that the LN is not suited to perform larger payments and that users should still think about using Bitcoin’s main blockchain.

There are some solutions being developed to tackle these issues and allow individuals to make larger payments on the Lightning Network.

Todays-Bitcoin-BTC-Price-Prediction-Latest-Ethereum-ETH-Ripple-XRP-and-BCH-Analysis