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Last week, the Lightning Network created history when a phone bill was paid instantaneously with Bitcoin. A programmer named Alex Bosworth paid the phone bill through a mobile topup service called Bitrefill. Alex Bosworth has confirmed this through a tweet as well.
The lightning transaction was done in a limited testing environment. The payment was made through a mainnet wallet, which is yet to be available for public use. Back in August, Bitrefill started testing the network.
Following the successful transaction, Bitrefill’s CEO Sergej Kotliar stated
“Everything is ready to go on our end, but we’re not launching it yet until a Lightning wallet is released for general use on mainnet.”
Bitrefill facilitates topup of SIM cards issued by more than 400 operators in 100 countries. Payments can be made either in Bitcoin or Litecoin.
Bitrefill’s website has put the caution notice on Bitcoin:
“Sometimes during high load on the Bitcoin network, and especially with older wallets that don’t use proper fee estimations, it can happen that transactions don’t confirm for long time. This is an unfortunate consequence of how Bitcoin works.”
The Lightning Network precisely solves the above issue by completing the transactions off-chain and updating it on the Bitcoin mainnet. Eventhough there are several altcoins, which claim to have overcome the issue of confirmations, Bitcoin remains the center of attraction as it is getting adopted at a faster pace than others.
