The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money
A cool use of the Lightning network is the podcast 2.0 initative. Currently, as I listen to podcasts, I stream back satoshis (sats), value for value (I use Castamatic on iOS, fountain.fm is also an option on Android). You can also send messages with sats attached, called “boosts”. Creators can transparantly split the sats they receive over various goals (i.e. FOSS projects [opensats], or guests on shows). There are no transaction fees afaik, that is just when your lightning node syncs with the main blockchain, and then you can bundle a lot of transactions.<p>I find this a very healthy counter movement to the current centralization that is going on in Podcasting where indie creators are being sucked into Spotify and YouTube (and sometimes are being censored there).<p>The podcast 2.0 movement is not all about value for value, there are also cool features like artwork per chapter, sharing of snippets, a way to specify different formats (like opus) for the same podcast&#x2F;episode, and many more modern things. It’s a cool community and if you ask me, the first really useful thing to come out of “blockchain”.<p>Edit: Yeah I want to add some references but my company uses Cisco Umbrella and some things are blocked. Moreover, I can see it also MITMs my own websites (like my NextCloud instance), because those are not my certs!... But I digress.