Results

Various individuals and teams have participated in the Lightning Hackday. Some came to set up nodes, learn, solve problems, while others continued building on their projects or started new ones. Here we present some of these projects.

Kentissa

Playing Lightning Chess

Kent & Marissa set up new lightning nodes with the aim of getting to know the environment. The ultimate game: A game of Lightning-Chess. The experience: Setting up lnd and bitcoind can still be a bit time consuming and certainly require some existing knowledge. Lightning Chess is fun, but some core features are still missing (e.g. interactive wagers).

Sjors

Scooter Wisdom

There is lots of wisdom in scooter songs, but its hard to find. The Scooter Wisdom Store is a place where people can find quotes from songs from the popular German dance group Scooter. Sjors used the Lightning Hackday to finally add HTTPS as well as configure BTCPay. Disabling on-chain support proved difficult, but from now on people can buy wisdom on Sjors' store via Lightning.

Koji

Lightning Thoughts

What are good use cases for Lightning? Koji wants to outsource his thinking (“Which direction to go?”) and create a lightning prediction market. Lending services with lightning might also prove successful. Maybe one day something like the Exodus phone can come with a Casa Node?

Daniel

Lightning Poker

Daniel finished integrating Lightning into Fair Poker, a provably fair poker site. Daniel demoed Lightning deposit and withdrawal. The feature will be deployed by end of April.

Alex

Payable Links

Alex integrated Lightning payments to Payable Links, a site where people can sell digital goods. People who have their own node can provide their connection details. Users who dont can supply a bitcoin address. Also works with OpenNode API. Payable Links will go live in summer.

Tony

A node at home

Tony converted an old laptop into a Ubuntu server with a full Bitcoin, Tor and Lightning node. He had problems with opening channels. But everything is working. He just needs to disable sleep node when closing the laptop lid.

Boris

BTCPay with slow storage

Boris imports machine tools from Asia to Mexico. He has an online shop, Famatools, for consumables that accepts Bitcoin via Coingate. Boris spent the weekend replacing this with BTCPay. So far he never had any payments with bitcoin...

Boris is using DigitalOcean Spaces for US$5 per month for 500GB of slow storage to store the blocks. He just needed to configure some variables in the bitcoin.custom.yml to move blocks into the S3 storage, while data and index stay in the droplet.

Jun Jiao

Lightning Games

Jun Jiao had some great brainstorming sessions about Lightning games, especially with Daniel, Alex and Boris. The game slither.io seemed particularly interesting. What if you could play this with lightning? You pay to play, and collect people’s money as they crash their snake into you.

Arthur

Lightning Games

How can the power of Lightning invoices be used to create an automatic lucky draw? You can send an invoice to yourself, specify a person you want to pay through the node fee for increased privacy. This could also become a decentralized messaging service.

Larry

Lightning Names

Larry set up Lightning Names as a service that sells Blockstack names via the Lightning Network. Names are a digital asset, like cryptokitties and NFTs. Blockstack names are created by putting data into the OP_RETURN of a Bitcoin transaction. You have to make on-chain transactions. You can create a centralized server that registers the name on behalf of the user, paid for with Lightning. Larry had a great experience setting up BTCPay. There’s an API to create an order, when the order is paid Larry makes the on-chain transaction. You only have to provide your Bitcoin address that will then have control over the name. This could be very useful when tokens like STACKS are needed to register names, which users might not want to hold or handle.

Leo

Lightning Meetups

For our Lightning Meetup the evening before the Hackday Leo set up a game called Battleship. Attendees could "shoot" at a 16x8 block field which had various items hidden underneath. Each shot cost 10,000 SAT, while each item was worth between 1,000 and 100,000 satoshi. The game turned out to be fun, but the goal is to make such games more interactive between attendees. Meetups shouldn't be just awkward gatherings for extroverts and those who like to drink. Instead they should give everyone in society a way to casually and anxiety-free interact with each other.

Raymond

Developer Community

Hong Kong needs a better developer community, and Bitwork is happy to foster that. Soon Bitwork is celebrating its first birthday. Lots of different tasks with clients and partners. Looking forward to host many more interesting and qualitative events.

Felix

Lightning ATMs

Lightning is great for Bitcoin ATMs. In December 2017 it became very hard to process transactions for ATM providers. It would be better if you could “top up” your bitcoin wallet in the same way as an Octopus Card. Unconfirmed transactions are not secure, so it’s hard to dispense fiat for bitcoin. Goal: Make eclair work on the General Bytes ATMs.