Well this is an exciting start to this mid-October Monday in the world of Bitcoin. Seemingly out of nowhere, Electrum, the open-source project that has been producing wallet and server software for bitcoiners since 2011 announced that their next implementation will support Lightning Network payments. Joining the ranks of LND (Golang), Eclair (Scala), and c-lightning (C); Electrum's implementation will be written in Python.

From Uncle Marty's surface layer understanding of the world of computer science and programming languages, Python is a particularly powerful and popular programming language at the moment. So hopefully, the emergence of this Lightning implementation from the wild means that the potential amount of people who will be able to leverage the Lightning Network to build powerful apps has just increased significantly.

For those of you a bit confused right now, the Lightning Network is a protocol with a certain ruleset. Different teams have created software written in different languages to interact with this ruleset. Each implementation, written in different programming languages, caters to the demographic of developers proficient in the particular language. The fact that a Python implementation now exists, again, means that there are now more potential people that can build on LN.

As time goes on, it will be interesting to see if these competing implementations can scale and maintain compatibility with each other as LN becomes more popular. We here at the Ƀent will be following along with the progress made by each implementation and LN overall.

Shoutout to the Electrum team for building this out and ninja announcing it today. Very excited to see what types of app-building this enables.

Final thought...

All nighters into 6am flights, not ideal.