$BTC: MicroStrategy Chairman Is Teaching Friends How to Use Bitcoin’s Lightning Network
On Monday (October 10), Michael Saylor, co-founder and executive chairman of business intelligence software company MicroStrategy Inc. (NASDAQ: MSTR), spoke about Bitcoin’s Lightning Network.
Recall that on August 11, 2020, MicroStrategy announced in 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 corporate treasury program – risks, which should be addressed proactively.“
Since then, MicroStrategy has continued to accumulate Bitcoin and its former CEO has become one of Bitcoin’s most vocal supporters. MicroStrategy’s recent $100 BTC purchase, which Saylor tweeted about on Sept. 20, 2022, means the company is now HODLing around 130,000 bitcoins that are “sold for ~$3.98 billion at an average price of ~$30,639.” were acquired per bitcoin”.
Here is how Binance Academy explains what the Lightning Network is:
“The Lightning Network is a network that sits on top of a blockchain to enable fast peer-to-peer transactions. It is not exclusive to Bitcoin – other cryptocurrencies like Litecoin have it integrated. You may be wondering what we mean by “sitting on a blockchain”. The Lightning Network is what is known as an off-chain or layer 2 solution. It allows individuals to transact without having to record every transaction on the blockchain.
“The Lightning network is separate from the Bitcoin network – it has its own nodes and software, but still communicates with the main chain. To enter or leave the Lightning network, you need to create special transactions on the blockchain. What you’re actually doing with your first transaction is some sort of smart contract with another user.“
Saylor first tweeted over the Lightning Network on May 26, 2021:
On September 4, 2022, CoinDesk reported that Saylor spoke (via video call) to an audience at the Baltic Honeybadger conference in Riga, Latvia on Saturday (September 3) and that he had to say what his company meant by it does the Lightning network:
“MicroStrategy currently has a few R&D projects running where we are working on enterprise applications of Lightning: Enterprise Lightning Wallet, Enterprise Lightning Server, Enterprise Authentication.“
He also explained why he thinks Lightning has a great future:
“The advantage of Lightning is not only that you can scale Bitcoin to billions of people or reduce transaction costs to almost zero, but also that the ethos of Bitcoin is to be very cautious and not fast to the base layer without the universal to move consensus, but in Lightning you can be much more aggressive in developing features and taking more risks with the applications than with the underlying Bitcoin layer.“
Late last month, MicroStrategy began searching for a Lightning software engineer to help them “build a Lightning Network-based SaaS platform that provides businesses with innovative solutions to cybersecurity challenges and enables new e-commerce use cases.”
On October 4, 2022, Saylor confirmed that — despite the opinion of Stockholm-based software engineer Eric Wall — he has performed more than three Bitcoining Lightning transactions over the course of his life:
Well, this morning Saylor spoke about how he spent the past weekend:
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