Notes
I learned Lightning by breaking it down in public. These are my hands-on notes from Chaincode’s Lightning protocol course — HTLCs, MAC/HMAC, and why payments fail, explained without jargon.
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Why Lightning payments fail — and what happens next
A Lightning payment can die for boring reasons — a node went offline, a channel ran dry, a fee was too low. I collected the failure modes I kept running into, so you can recogni...
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How Lightning nodes trust each other: MAC and HMAC, simply explained
If anyone could rewrite messages between Lightning nodes, payments would fall apart. I dug into where MAC and HMAC actually sit in the protocol, and why they matter. Here is the...
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HTLCs explained: how Lightning moves money without trust
I kept hearing “HTLC” and nodding along — until I had to explain it myself. Here is the simple version I wish someone gave me: how Lightning moves sats across people you don’t t...