Visual guide3 min
How a Lightning channel works
A channel changes claims to allocated funds without recording every payment as a new on-chain transaction.
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Make sense of the mechanisms.
Follow a question, experiment with an idea, or take the guided path. There’s more than one way to understand.
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Follow a Bitcoin payment
An everyday action connects wallets, outputs, fees, and confirmation. Read the path in order, at your own pace.
01Your wallet, your keys, and your bitcoin: what lives where?
02What actually happens when you send bitcoin?
03UTXOs and change: why one payment can create two outputs
04Bitcoin transaction fees and virtual size
05Pending, confirmed, and reorganized: a payment’s changing status
06How a Lightning channel works
6 published articles
Interactive lesson4 min
Why can a Lightning node send but not receive?
The same channel can have plenty of capacity and very little room for a payment in one direction.
Explore the lessonVisual guide3 min
On-chain and Lightning payments: what changes for the user?
Compare the payment journey, including setup, completion signals and failure cases.
Read the guideVisual guide3 min
What happens inside a crypto checkout?
An invoice, a payment observation, and an order are related records—not the same thing.
Read the guideVisual guide4 min
Why a webhook can arrive more than once
Design a repeated notification to produce one business effect, even when acknowledgments get lost.
Read the guideVisual guide4 min
Payment received versus order fulfilled: designing clear statuses
Keep financial observations separate from the decision to deliver a product.
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