Want to really understand how lightning works? Join us for an in-depth and hands on, project based investigation of building lightning channels, making payments, finding routes, and making onions. By the end of this class you’ll have implemented a hodl-invoice plugin, bolt11 invoice decoder, an onion packager, and a routing algorithm that can parse through gossip to find a route.

BOLTing it Together

This class will give you an overview of the Lightning BOLT specs: what they cover, how Lightning contracts work, how payments move through Lightning, and how nodes hide and reveal themselves via gossip.

Code in Lightning

We’ll use Lightning Plugins to manually HODL invoices, build onions for routes, and understand gossip messages.

Class Objectives

By the end of this class, you should be familiar with basic Core Lightning RPCs, have written a few plugins for Core Lightning, and be well versed in how payments, channel opens + closes, and the gossip network function.

Exercises in this class will be in Python using Jupyter notebooks. Nix strongly recommended for running the notebooks.