A small change with a big impact.
These days, you can pretty much listen to any song you want, immediately, with your phone.
Of course it wasn't always this way.
There've been plenty of innovations in the history of music: from records to cassettes, CDs to iTunes - and now, Spotify.
This little innovation is set to have a similar impact as the 'CDs to iTunes' phase, for Bitcoin payments.
We've covered the Lightning Network before; but as a quick recap, the 'Lightning Network' is a Layer-2 protocol (which simply means it was built on top of the 'Layer-1 Bitcoin network') which makes payments almost instant, and incredibly cheap.
To put it another way:
If Bitcoin were your bank account, the Lightning Network would be Venmo (or PayPal).
Venmo lets you exchange money instantly (for next to nothing), whereas a bank transfer will usually take a few days to be confirmed (and come with weighty fees).
Bitcoin = slow/expensive.
Lightning Network = fast/cheap.
Problem is, even on the Lightning Network, you still need to send the BTC to a string of numbers and letters that only a freak could remember.
(It looks something like this: bc1qxy2kgdygjrsqtzq2n0yrf2493p83kkfjhx0)
Until now.
A new update has just been released which allows anyone to send BTC over the Lightning Network with a simple domain.
It was put best in the announcement, "like an email address, but for money."
The potential for transacting on the Lightning Network is huge. But there's always been a user experience issue.
We may not be at the 'Spotify level' user experience yet (that would be when everyone can, and does, use BTC like cash 2.0 through the Lightning Network), but this feels like the 'buy this song for $0.99 on iTunes' stage.
And that...is very exciting.
