Builders on Wall Street: Bitcoin Devs Host Lightning Hack Day

The Lightning Hackday, which took place in the heart of Wall Street on October 27th and 28th, was all-in-all more of a community-led endeavor with a heavy coding twist.

Bitcoin's lightning network is still in its early stages, but many hope it will fix bitcoin's biggest underlying problems - that it's simply too slow and clunky, and so doesn't scale well for a future of mass adoption - at least, that is, without the help of a second layer.

Lightning Labs engineer Alex Bosworth admitted that lightning's "Killer app" - what takes it mainstream - might be as simple as that.

Bosworth, though suspects that the best ideas for using lightning haven't even been created yet.

One idea: use lightning for passing around little pieces of a file, so that when they're brought together they recreate the full file.

With all of the futuristic, look-past-the-horizon ideas aside, another key focus of the Lightning Hackday was simply making lightning easier to use.

"There's a lot going on, but there's also not," bitcoin enthusiast Toby Algya said, laughing about how difficult lightning is to set up.

"I'm just trying to get lightning working. That's my personal challenge for the day."

While Pickhardt offered some ideas at the Lightning Hackday, he noted that no solution is perfect since there's a "Tradeoff between privacy and the quality of recommendations."

On a related note, a few key lightning developers are meeting in Australia next week to discuss the future of the project's specifications.