$BTC: MicroStrategy Chairman Teaches Friends How to Use Bitcoin’s Lightning Network
On Monday (Oct. 10), Michael Saylor, co-founder and executive chairman of software company MicroStrategy Inc. (NASDAQ: MSTR ), spoke about Bitcoin’s Lightning Network.
It’s worth remembering that on August 11, 2020, MicroStrategy announced via a press release that it had “purchased 21,454 bitcoins for a total purchase price of $250 million” to use as a “primary treasury reserve asset.”
Saylor said at the time:
“Our decision to invest in Bitcoin at this time was driven in part by a confluence of macro factors affecting the economic and business landscape that we believe create long-term risks to our financial program – risks that should be proactively managed.“
Since then, MicroStrategy has continued to accumulate Bitcoin and its former CEO has become one of Bitcoin’s most vocal advocates. MicroStrategy’s latest $BTC purchase, which Saylor tweeted about on September 20, 2022, means the firm now holds around 130,000 bitcoins, which were “acquired for ~$3.98 billion at an average price of ~$30,639 per bitcoin.”
Here’s how the Binance Academy explains what the Lightning Network is:
“The Lightning Network is a network that sits on top of a blockchain to facilitate fast peer-to-peer transactions. It is not exclusive to Bitcoin – other cryptocurrencies such as Litecoin have integrated it. You might be wondering what we mean by “sitting on top of a blockchain.” Lightning Network is what is called an off-chain or layer two solution. It allows individuals to transact without having to record each transaction on the blockchain.
“The Lightning Network is separate from the Bitcoin network – it has its own nodes and software, but it still communicates with the main chain. To enter or exit the Lightning Network, you must create special transactions on the blockchain. What you’re actually doing with your first transaction is building some sort of smart contract with another user.“
Saylor first tweeted about the Lightning Network on May 26, 2021:
On September 4, 2022, CoinDesk reported that Saylor had spoken (via video call) on Saturday (September 3) to an audience at the Baltic Honeybadger conference in Riga, Latvia, and had this to say about what his firm does. Lightning Network:
“MicroStrategy has some R&D projects going on right now where we’re working on enterprise applications for Lightning: Enterprise Lightning Wallet, Enterprise Lightning Servers, Enterprise Authentication.“
He also explained why he believes Lightning has a great future:
“The advantage of Lightning is not only that you can scale up bitcoin for billions of people, or get the transaction costs to almost nothing, but also the ethos of bitcoin is to tread very carefully and not move quickly on the base layer without the universal consensus, but in Lightning you can you move much more aggressively developing functionality and taking more risks with the applications than you can with the underlying bitcoin layer.“
Late last month, MicroStrategy began looking for a Lightning software engineer to help them “build a Lightning Network-based SaaS platform, which provides businesses with innovative solutions to cybersecurity challenges and enables new eCommerce use cases.”
On October 4, 2022, Saylor confirmed that – despite what Stockholm-based software engineer Eric Wall believes – he has made more than three Bitcoining Lightning transactions in his lifetime:
Well, earlier today Saylor talked about how he spent this weekend:
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