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HOW TO USE THE LIGHTNING NETWORK

For someone who has never paid a Lightning invoice. Four steps, a couple of minutes, and a wall at the end where one square costs one sat.

WHAT IT IS

A way to send satoshis between two people, easily. A satoshi, or sat, is the smallest piece of a bitcoin: one bitcoin is 100,000,000 sats. Two people open a channel between them and pay each other across it as many times as they want, and only the opening and the closing are written to Bitcoin itself. Payments hop from channel to channel, so you can reach anyone on the network without opening one with them. It is a layer built on top of Bitcoin, it is fast, and it costs close to nothing, which is what makes everyday micropayments possible at all. It was not invented by Satoshi. Joseph Poon and Thaddeus Dryja published it in 2015.

FOUR STEPS

  1. Install a Lightning wallet. Two kinds: custodial, where a company holds the sats for you and which is the fastest to start, and self custodial, where they sit on your phone and nobody can recover them for you. This page names none, because this site is affiliated with none.
  2. Put a few thousand sats in it. Most wallets sell you a small amount inside the app, and an exchange can pay you out over Lightning instead of on chain, where the fee on a small withdrawal often costs more than the withdrawal.
  3. Get an invoice. A long string starting with lnbc, almost always shown as a QR code, carrying one amount, one destination and an expiry. Each one is payable once. Here they last ten minutes.
  4. Scan it. It settles in about a second. There is no block to wait for and no confirmation count: either the payment arrives, or it fails and the sats never leave your wallet.

WHEN IT FAILS

  • Expired invoice. Nothing was taken. Ask for another one.
  • Not enough balance. A payment also carries a small routing fee, so an invoice for exactly your balance will not go through.
  • No route found. Your wallet found no path with enough capacity to the destination. Try again, or from another wallet.
  • It worked. Then it is final: there is no chargeback on Lightning, by design, and nobody can reverse it for you.

NOW DO IT FOR ONE SAT

There is a wall in this machine: 210,000 squares, one for every 100 bitcoins that will ever exist. A square nobody has painted costs one sat. Pick your squares, scan the invoice, and they appear for everybody the second the payment lands.

READ THE RULES OF THE WALL ›

SMALL PRINT

This page explains a public network. It is not financial advice, it is affiliated with no wallet, company or exchange, and a Lightning payment is final: nobody here can trace it, cancel it or reverse it. Pay only what you are willing to lose.