In October 2008, Satoshi Nakomoto published a document describing a monetary system based on secure crypto-graphical mathematics. The document, titled “Bitcoin: A Peer to Peer Electronic Cash System” proposed a revolutionary payment system using an inviolable distributed ledger known as the blockchain. This ingenious system came with the ideological promise of replacing existing centralized payment processors and their associated middleman inefficiencies and costs. With that promise, bitcoin has the potential to disrupt the world economic order as we know it, arguably for the better as billions of people, the unbanked and those living in marginalized societies will be brought into a modern, integrated, digitized, borderless and globalized economy. Transactions will be peer to peer, counterbalancing the negative effects from the blunt and inefficient tools by centralized institutions which have the propensity for generating negative externalities as evident in the financial crisis of 2008.
To date, the vision of Satoshi (whose identity remains unknown) is still in the making as there were issues involving scalability and the speed at which transactions could be confirmed. However, much progress has been made to overcome these limitations. In particular, the lightning network, a Layer 2 payment protocol has been put into operation. Adoption in this direction is gathering momentum and several applications using the lightning network are now available.
This site will follow in lockstep the progress in the development of bitcoin and the lightning network as a payment system and observe other bitcoin opportunities and use cases as they arise. Where possible open source solutions as proof of concepts will be showcased and documented here.
Currently, www.usesatoshi.com provides working examples of using bitcoin and the lightning network for extremely quick and low cost on line payments, especially for micro-payments. As the bitcoin denomination (BTC) is currently valued at about USD 7000-8000, a smaller satoshi (SAT) unit is now also widely adopted and valued to be 1/100,000,000 BTC and is the smallest amount of BTC that can be transferred. This site showcases e-store, publishing paywall, crowdfunding and POS applications which uses bitcoin/satoshi and the lightning network where payments can be made without the need of a bank, credit card or traditional payment processor.
PLEASE NOTE.
This site is experimental and is used to demonstrate BTCPay Server for processing BTC and Lightning transactions. Orders will be not fulfilled and refunds will not be made as transactions cannot be reversed.
