HTLCs: How Lightning Moves Money Through Strangers

This story was originally published on HackerNoon at: https://hackernoon.com/htlcs-how-lightning-moves-money-through-strangers. How Hash Time-Locked Contracts let strangers route Lightning payments trustlessly across a chain of nodes, using hashes and timeouts to guarantee no one loses f Check more stories related to web3 at: https://hackernoon.com/c/web3. You can also check exclusive content about #lightning-network, #Bitcoin, #hashed-timelock-contracts, #htlc, #bitcoin-script, #lightning-routing, #multi-hop-payments, #hackernoon-top-story, and more. This story was written by: @tobses. Learn more about this writer by checking @tobses's about page, and for more stories, please visit hackernoon.com. HTLCs are the trick that lets Lightning move money across nodes that don't trust each other. A payment is locked to a secret's hash, and each hop can only claim its funds by revealing that secret - which in turn lets the previous hop claim theirs. A time-lock guarantees that if the payment stalls, everyone gets refunded instead of losing money. It's how a payment hops through strangers safely, with no one able to steal in the middle.