Transaction 0

Posted on by

Firing up the Thunder Network Rocket

Today, we announced the release of the ThunderNetwork which has the ability to make live, nearly instant, and ultra-cheap transactions that settle back to the Bitcoin blockchain.

We’ve written about our R&D efforts before and you can read all about the details in our previous . As a reminder, the ThunderNetwork is a way to send bitcoin “off-chain” to other parties in a trustless manner based on the lightning.network .

Yesterday afternoon, Mats and I made the very first payments using the Thunder network. Below is a quick tour of Thunder and a recap of what happened.

At a high level, the transaction movements looked like this:

First, we fired up both of our Thunder Network wallets and logged into our Blockchain Wallets (/shameless plug).

From there, I funded my Thunder Wallet:

https://blockchain.info/address/1NiENvbdyfJ157TcUT7NsBmBXKyMpGmqKk

Then, I connected to an independent node. In this case, thunder-1.blockchain.info:

Then, I opened a payment channel. You can see the channel from Mats and me connecting to the thunder-1 node, as information about them gets broadcasted across the network. This allows for easy routing of payments.

After receiving a Thunder Network address from Mats, I sent him 1,000 Satoshi instantly.

Now turning over the mic to Mats…

Mats J: I started with a more uneven balance in the payment channel. After receiving two transactions from Peter, my channel looked like this:

We transacted a little bit and sent money back and forth for free, which ended in this state:

You can see that all these payments are marked as [REDEEMED]. This means that they were embedded into the payment channel between me and the thunder-1 node, and then I claimed them by using the secret of each payment. This happens very fast in the background and you normally don’t notice any delay when transacting.

I then went ahead and closed the channel again:

https://blockchain.info/tx/c5978d34bae87bd42233686749bd7120a3d8604b53aa6914ad84e117694ddb0c

to have the money back in my Thunder wallet [ 12kugTnNRYnfQAwqN7c46i3XgaCHw8hXA1 ] to send it further back to my personal Blockchain wallet:

https://blockchain.info/de/tx/ea3ad1865e2e557b863615743e7c022f261a959525ee7fb363a47a43a06a5896

And just in case anyone is worried about Peter’s bitcoins..

You can see where he withdrew them back out of his Thunder Wallet and into his Blockchain Wallet: https://blockchain.info/address/198BqfahUfeMbU3f3H2eqRtU8eRLUkcp9J

Safely back on the main chain!

This is a big deal and we’re excited about the work ahead. Follow our blog for more updates as we continue to pursue this important work.

Originally published at https://blockchain-blog.ghost.io on May 16, 2016.

Transaction 0 was originally published in @blockchain on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.