Why Start a Lightning Newsletter?

Welcome to the New Year! Today we’re announcing The Simple Lightning Newsletter. This is a newsletter dedicated to helping users and companies understand how the lightning network works, follow its development status, and integrate with it and the future of Bitcoin. Too many people feel like they need a developer dictionary to keep up with Lightning development, our goal is to make following Lightning development simple.

Is it possible to follow the Bitcoin’s Lightning Network in simple terms?

At the moment, the easiest is to subscribe to the Lightning dev mailing list, but because it’s geared towards developers it isn’t as accessible for newcomers, app developers, project managers, or even founders. Because Lightning development is segmented into different implementations and companies, conversation about lightning development is also siloed into different chat groups, slack groups, and irc channels. As of yet there is no newsletter for the BOLT specifications, which is our motivation for existing.

Every other week on Wednesday we’ll release two blog posts (1) a status update on the Lightning spec development, and (2) a deep-dive into a Lightning specific concept. Both blog posts will be combined into one newsletter post, and if you’re subscribed they’ll be mailed to your inbox the same day they’re posted.

We will address the topic of BOLTs, bLIPs, privacy, taproot, PTLCs, payment metadata, dual funding, liquidity, onion messages, Trampoline, turbo channels, and more. We’re calling this project The Simple Lightning Newsletter, because we want to make these concepts as simple as possible. The first few months our status update posts may be a bit harder to understand or follow, until we have enough time for our deep dive posts to bring those less involved up to speed on recent developments. We’re excited about the Lightning Network because we believe it’s the future of Bitcoin, and the way to make bitcoin more immediately usable. As this second layer of Bitcoin is developed we want to help users and companies integrate and get onboarded.

We’ve spent the last few weeks meeting with developers and authors of other newsletters in the ecosystem. We’re excited to create this content for you, build a cadence with these posts, and we hope that they will be a useful contribution to you and the larger Bitcoin community.

Our plans for the new year and new newsletter are:

• Serve as an additional resource for parties interested in integrating Lightning.
• Get more people aware of the Lightning Network BOLT specification.
• Make understanding the Lightning Network more accessible.

Although we both work in the Bitcoin industry at Blockstream, we are not profit-driven, and this is a passion project for us outside of our work at a single company. This is not a Blockstream newsletter. If you’d like to be a part of this project, we would welcome any independent contributors.

Shoot us a message at simplelightning@protonmail.com.

Cheers and more cheers,

Kiara Bickers