Berliner Pub Room 77: First beer of the world paid with lightning transaction

Berlin’s Room77 is the Bitcoin center of the German capital. Here you can pay for years beer and burgers with Bitcoin. On the weekend the lightning developer Olaoluwa Osuntokun paid a beer for the first time with a lightning transaction with pub owners Jörg Platzer …

“You can pay with Bitcoins for many years now (with unconfirmed transactions and directly, not via BitPay),” writes Jörg Platzer. “Today we have set up a Lightning Node for the testnet and have accepted testnet coins from some customers via the Lightning network to get an outlook on the future. And this future shines bright! ”

Strictly speaking, the beer was not paid with Testnet coins. Because one of the rules of the Bitcoin testnet is that one should not give the coins in it a real value. In fact, Platzer has simply given a beer to anyone who succeeded in sending a testnet transaction with Testnet Coins via the Lightning Network (LN). In the establishment, Lightning developer Olaoluwa Osuntokun aka Roasbeef helped him, who has probably also paid the first beer with Lightning.

Announcing the first ever Lightning brick and mortar transaction buying beer at @room77_berlin with LND! #bitcoin https://t.co/JuiBGQWhYR

— Lightning (@lightning) April 1, 2017

Platzer enthused about the experience: “You do not have to wait until the transaction of the customers in the network is propagated. It comes in milliseconds instead of seconds … you do not have to look for double spends anymore. Not even Peter Todd can deceive us with RBF over LN … massively improved privacy since only we and our customers can see the transaction on the payment channel. “As a trader who accepts Bitcoins, Platzer can say that” every trader On this planet this thing wants. It is as if Bitcoin would demonstrate after all these years that it can use LN’s promise of efficiency, speed, irreversibility and privacy no matter how many people use it. ”

The Lightning network connects payment channels in which unauthorized bitcoin transactions are exchanged. This has the advantage that not every transaction has to be perpetuated on the blockchain, which allows a massive expansion of Bitcoin’s capacity without burdening the nodes that support the network. Since the Lightning network is changing massively and favorably the scale of Bitcoin’s scalability, many developers are currently working to make Bitcoin ready for broad use through the mainstream.

Currently, Lightning is still in the alpha version. However, there are already several implementations that follow Lightning’s specification. As the test in Room77 shows, Lightning, at least with Testnet-Coins and in a manageable framework, already works. However, in order to be tested on the Livenet, ie with real bitcoins, the current Lightning implementation is still dependent on SegWit being activated.

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