Bitcoin Lightning Tech Expands Beyond Invoices in Step Toward Better UX

Bitcoin's lightning network has taken a big step toward a better user experience courtesy of new work by one of its principal open-source developers.

Lightning Labs CTO Olaoluwa Osuntokun recently released a rough draft of a code change that would allow users to accept an address that doesn't need to change each time.

Lightning K0ala, the pseudonymous developer who created lightning's first hit game, even argued on Twitter: "This unlocks a whole set of possibilities for end-user UX.".

"It's definitely needed," Bitcoin Core and lightning network contributor Ben Woosley told CoinDesk.

Very importantly, it's not a perfect code implementation - not by far, meaning the usual warnings about using bitcoin's lightning network while it's still early-stage definitely still apply.

Right now in lightning, users and merchants accept payments via invoices.

If a user were to accept a second payment to the address, the payment could be stolen.

Lightning developer René Pickhardt even "Hacked" the lightning software to allow users to do so, releasing code for others who would want to do the same.

People call the new feature "Spontaneous payments" because the recipient of a payment doesn't have to approve that they're getting a payment ahead of time, as is done with an invoice.

In addition to Sphinx send, the code change will lay the foundations for future much-anticipated code changes, including Atomic Multi-Path Payments, a way to combine many lightning channels into one.