Thunder Network, Paves The Way For Instant Bitcoin Transactions

The Introduction Of Thunder Network

Quietly working on an interesting project called Thunder is Blockchain the company behind the world’s most popular Bitcoin wallet. An alternative network of nodes allowing you to make off-chain Bitcoin payments in seconds as well as settle back to the Bitcoin blockchain now and then. This makes us excited all over again about Bitcoin. While it does sound complicated but in reality its quite neat and powerful innovation for Bitcoin transactions. The first is taking a step back. In case you have ever tried sending a couple of bitcoins from one wallet to another, it is a known fact that it can take ten or twenty minutes before blockchain confirms the transaction. 

Taking into account the reason behind this is that blockchain comes with a network of servers sharing the same record of transactions sending two bitcoins as well as nodes in the case of the blockchain that is going to write at least a line with this transaction and so that everyone confirms the originating wallet lost two bitcoins and the destination wallet has two extra bitcoins. While this is great, making Bitcoin completely decentralized, it is also slow, hard to scale as well as expensive. 

What Do The Experts Have To Say?

Writing a paper about bitcoin’s scalability and speed issues and defined Lightning networks, Joseph Poon and Thaddeus Driya explains that these alternative networks would run independently from the main Bitcoin blockchain and would be able to register transactions in just a second using smart contracts that all nodes in a lightning network doesn’t need to be aware of all transactions. 

While this was all theory, blockchain hired Mats Jerratsch starting to work on a sort of implementation of the lightning network, as the company announces and open sources. As the first implementation of lightning-like networks, thunder is with blockchain already running thunder nodes as well as Bitcoin companies looking at the source code providing thunder wallets adopting the network or fork it. While it is true that thunder can also work with other cryptocurrencies, the startup made the first live transaction on thunder. 

Whereas it comes to be said that in this case, blockchain isn’t going to use thunder for blockchain wallet users and yet the startup is already thinking about real-life advantages of a solution like thunder. A transaction is so fast with thunder that the network processes 100,000 transactions per second as on an average Visa handles 2000 transactions per second and the Visa network is capable of processing 56,000 transactions per second.  

How Is Thunder Targeting Blockchain?

Putting this into perspective, we find blockchain wallet users are on track making 40 million transactions this year with around 1.3 transactions per second. While to be honest this is quite impressive as there are many other wallets out there given that blockchain is the most popular wallet maker, making Bitcoin transaction volume very far behind visa. The reason found behind this is that Bitcoin transactions are too cumbersome convincing projects like thunder to be a part of the solution. 

The transaction comes cheaper which is an important factor to be considered thanks to Thunder as you settle back the thunder payments to bitcoins blockchain there are still blockchain fees involved. While you can surely make many thunder transactions before settling back to the blockchain along with thunder transactions, it doesn’t involve as many nodes. Dividing the fees by the number of Thunder transactions is paying using Bitcoin becoming much cheaper as the fees come as cheap as that you could finally imagine making microtransactions in bitcoins.  

It can be counted that this is the main target of thunder that makes Bitcoin a viable alternative to Visa while removing many of the limitations behind the existing Bitcoin protocol. While there are some roadblocks, thunder can’t surely work with anyone with a Bitcoin wallet as yet Bitcoin core development team needs to release segregated witness along with CHECKSEQUENCEVERIFY features, the good news, on the other hand, is that these features are on the roadmap with the core team making lightning networks possible. Thunder until then relies on trusted nodes, whereas with future Bitcoin updates, thunder is set to become a full-on lightning network. 

The Conclusion

It is well-acknowledged fact that thunder is an exciting project where something could drastically change some of the Bitcoin use cases as many have turned to alternative cryptocurrencies such as ether due to the limitations of bitcoins slowly but surely when the community is catching up, making Bitcoin payments seem more attractive. Thus thunder promises to be the future network on blockchain and helps investors with their ease and fast pace.