VOTE FOR LIGHTNING!

The first on-chain vote has successfully begun! Vote now for the Decred development team to begin work on Lightning Network (LN) integration. This marks a historic moment, and a blockchain first. For the first time ever people will be able to have a direct influence over the future of their own finances. Made possible only with Decred.

What is the Lightning Network?
The LN is a decentralized system for instant, high-volume micropayments that removes the risk of delegating custody of funds to trusted third parties. The benefits of these instant and scalable blockchain transactions are summarised below from lightning.network website.

• Instant Payments. Lightning-fast blockchain payments without worrying about block confirmation times. Security is enforced by blockchain smart-contracts without creating a on-blockchain transaction for individual payments. Payment speed measured in milliseconds to seconds.
• Scalability. Capable of millions to billions of transactions per second across the network. Capacity blows away legacy payment rails by many orders of magnitude. Attaching payment per action/click is now possible without custodians.
• Low Cost. By transacting and settling off-blockchain, the Lightning Network allows for exceptionally low fees, which allows for emerging use cases such as instant micropayments.
• Cross Blockchains. Cross-chain atomic swaps can occur off-chain instantly with heterogeneous blockchain consensus rules. So long as the chains can support the same cryptographic hash function, it is possible to make transactions across blockchains without trust in 3rd party custodians.

For a more detailed and technical overview of what the LN has to offer, see the official LN development team paper here. Or, see this article for a simplier explaination.

Why vote for LN integration on Decred?
Buy a coffee, instantly, with a near zero transaction fee! In the cryptocurrency community there is an obsession with comparing the effectiveness of a coins payment network against its ability to purchase a coffee – without the need to wait for a prolonged period of time for the transaction to be confirmed, or pay a transaction fee equivalent to the cost of the coffee itself!

With LN integration on Decred you will be able to buy a coffee, the transaction will be instantly confirmed, and the transaction fee will be exceptionally low. In addition, LN will allow Decred to scale its payment network to a level similar to Visa. Millions of people around the world will be able simulatiously purchase a coffee (or anything else) at the same time with Decred!

Decred is well on its way to becoming the ultimate cryptocurrency. A self-funded coin with an outstanding development team, an unrivaled decentralized governance system and a community that is second to none. If we throw in instant low-cost transactions with LN integration and privacy enhancement on the roadmap – can anything surpass the greatness of Decred?

How to vote?
For a detailed guide on how to vote click here.

Track voting progress
Once you have voted visit voting.decred.org or dcrstats.com to track the progress of the vote.

What are you waiting for!
If you believe in the decentralized future of finance and want to be part of it – go buy some Decred and vote for Lightning!

M. K.