📖 Bitcoin History — The Lightning Network Bitcoin's base layer is slow by design — it prioritizes security over speed. So in 2015, Joseph Poon and Thaddeus Dryja published the Lightning Network whitepaper. The idea: open payment channels between users, route payments off-chain at near-zero cost and near-instant speed, then settle the final balance on-chain. Today, Lightning has over 40,000 channels and thousands of BTC in capacity. You can tip someone in Nigeria 10 sats in under a second. El Salvador runs on it. It's still early — but it's working. #Bitcoin #Nostr #Cypherpunk