Week 4

More Mastering Lightning

This week, we'll be building on the previous knowledge of Lightning Network by continuing with the "Mastering Lightning" Book. Discussions will be in small groups as usual as you answer discussion questions.

A web-reader-friendly hosted version of the book can be found at lnbook.256k1.dev, which can be accessed for educational purposes using username and password qala:lightning.

Prerequisites

• All the previous weeks' developer environments for both Bitcoin and Lightning Network.

Goals

At the end of the week, we hope that you will:

• Understand the architecture of Lightning Network

• Understand Payment Channels

  • Constructing a Payment Channel

  • Sending Payment accross the Channel

  • The Commitment Transaction

  • Advancing the Channel State

  • Closing the Channel

• Understand Routing on a network of Payment Channels

  • Routing a Payment

  • Routing vs pathfinding

  • Creating a network of Payment Channels

  • Fairness Protocol

  • Hash Time-Locked Contracts (HTLCs)

Schedule

Continue with Mastering Lightning reading as detailed below.

Day	Chapters
Monday	Chapter 6: Lightning Network Architecture
Tuesday	Chapter 7: Payment Channels (up to and excluding "Sending Payments Across the Channel")
Wednesday	Chapter 7: (rest of the chapter)
Thursday	Chapter 8: Routing on a Network of Payment Channels (up to and excluding "Hash Time-Locked Contracts")
Friday	Chapter 8: (rest of the chapter)

If you finish your chapter(s) for the day early, feel free to move on to the next day's chapter(s), as repetition is key when it comes to absorbing so much knowledge.

Deliverables

Each day, do the required reading and:

• Be prepared for the daily discussion groups:

  • Finish reading the chapter(s) for the day

  • Prepare and research your assigned question(s), make sure you can host the discussion and think about follow-up questions etc

  • Prepare and research the questions hosted by other people in your group

• Near the end of the week start thinking about which project you would like to tackle next from the project list.

Building Lightning Apps Workshop

Please try to complete this by the end of the week. You will need Polar installed and working for the workshop.

Follow along with Brian Mancini's "Building a Lightning Graph" workshop which can be found here. There is documentation for the workshop here.

Project demos

We are reserving 30 minutes every Thursday for demo time! We highly encourage participation so you can show off what you built! This week we will be hearing all about the wallet project you've all been working on.

Read all about them on https://course.qala.dev/meetings and reserve your slot once you've got something to share. Demos don't need to be perfect or beautiful, just let us all share in your excitement and experience!