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Lightning User Experience

Lightning Network is a scalable and extremely fast decentralized transactional networking system that facilitates realtime payments and transactions across connected parties/members. It uses smart contract in the blockchain to speed up transactional processes.

Lightning Network is a new Innovations. Since invention of Bitcoin, Bitcoin Crypto Currency has suffered major problem of scalability and transactional speed. This scalability issues is also associated with other cryptocurrency transactional systems.

By Scalability, Bitcoin and other Crypto Currency is capable of processing little or less than twenty transactions/payments per seconds and this is really poor as transactions takes alots of time to verify and process and this causes high transactional fees.

To this effect, If Bitcoin is to compete with other prevalent Payments Systems like MasterCard, Visa Cards etc. which according some Researchers can verify and process above 30,000 to 50,000 transaction per second, then Bitcoin Payments system has to be more scalable and speedy enough to meet up with the emerging and modern payments Systems. To this effect, Lightning Network was born.

This Lightning Network works by creating an instant Transactional/Payments channels on Bitcoin blockchain between two connected participants. This channel will continue to be valid as long as the connected participants wants. Because the lightning Transactions involves only two participants, the transaction fees applicable is neither very little or negligible.

Within the Lightning Network channels, all transactions takes place outside of the main block-chain.

In Lightning Network two Participant can peer-up and setup a channel on Lightning Network with a Multi-signature Wallets where they can fund their money(Bitcoin) and transactions can be performed by the Peers with the Bitcoin deposited in their shared wallets and once the channel is closed, each of the participants gets his bitcoin balance as their bitcoin balance gets propagated to their respective bitcoin blockchain accounts.

Lightning Network works by allowing the Peers to perform an unlimited or uncountable amount of transaction outside the main blockchain and then record and propagates all these transactions as just one transactions.

Here I will be focusing more on Lightning User Experience. Listing some factors that might light up or affect users lightening Experience...

1) Distributed Denial of Service Attack(DDOS):

According to Security Experts, this kind of attacks can introduce enthropy or disruption of transactions/payments on the lightning network. If this ever happen, the user may be pissed off.

According to Source: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack], DDOS is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connected to the Internet. Denial of service is typically accomplished by flooding the targeted machine or resource with superfluous requests in an attempt to overload systems and prevent some or all legitimate requests from being fulfilled.

DDOS attack can occur in lightning network since payments/transactions is propagated across a network of nodes. This nodes can be DDOSed resulting in disruption of transactions. Even almighty Google, Github and all those giant sites may not be free from DDOS attack.

This kind of attack does not give an attacker an access to any fund rather attacker's aim is to keep the nodes down thus ensuring that payments are disrupted thereby frustrating the connected Peers.

Good news is that site like Cloudflare.org, sucuri.net etc. can help to mitigates all sorts of DDOS Attack by filtering the traffic entering the lightening nodes from the Cloud or Lightning Network Engineers may come up with their own solutions as DDOS may be inevitable as Lightning Network continues to grows.

2.)Introduction of Users/Participants Management Systems:

To enhance more users experience, the ability to control participant actions and behaviors has to be introduced. Actions such as banning or closing account of the offending Participants. A flag or Reporting system may also be need to be introduced to immediately report any offending user. This will have a long way in punishing users with evil plan. We are on Internet, where anything can happen.

3.)Messaging System:

Introduction of realtime messaging or Chat: Introduction of Realtime messaging System to provide real-time communications between the Peers will also be awesome.

4.)Low Payments Fees:

This need to be very little or even negligible to troop-in more users into using it.

5.)Scalability and Transactional/Payments Speed:

Lightning Network should be able to keep to its promise of being extremely fast. I mean being faster and able to compete with the already existing Payments systems like MasterCard, VisaCard etc. If Possible, Lightning Network should be able to process over one million of transactions per seconds.

6.)Cross Block-Chain Transactions:

Ability of the Participants to perform transactions from one chain(Eg. Bitcoin) to another blockchain (Eg. LiteCoin) without trusting any Third Party as long both chains shares the same cryptographic hash functions.