Lightning Labs, the company building software for the Bitcoin Lightning Network, posts about its protocols, products, and hiring.
HN links it mostly in hiring posts and as the reference for Lightning as a layer-2 solution for scaling payments; commenters give little opinion beyond that.
Lightning Labs | Senior Engineering Manager, Lightning Protocol Engineer, Senior Security Engineer| San Francisco | Remote | Full-time
https://lightning.engineering/join-us
https://github.com/lightninglabs
Lightning Labs is hiring! We’re looking to expand our team to build technology that'll bring Bitcoin to the next billion people. Our current focus is the development and deployment of the Lightning Network, an open blockchain scalability protocol. We push the edge of innovation with regard to blockchain scalability, privacy-preserving smart contracts, and cryptocurrency UX. If you’re interested in one of the positions below, please apply using our careers page: https://lightning.engineering/join-us. And if you know someone who might be a good fit, we'd very much appreciate any referrals.
{Protocol Engineer}:
Experienced systems software engineer versed in applied cryptography, peer-to-peer networks, distributed systems, open source software, and cryptocurrency protocols to design and implement core protocol and algorithmic components of the Lightning Network as well as the Bitcoin Network. Solid programming skills, experience with Go, C, or C++. Prior contributions to crypto protocols and open source software collaboration preferred.
{Senior Security Engineer}:
Seeking to hire a Security Engineer for the ongoing scaling of our growing engineering organization. This is a hands-on role that consists of devising and implementing policies and procedures around best…
> The core developers (employed by Blockstream)
There are hundreds of Core developers; only about 6 of them are related to Blockstream. Your conspiracy theory does not hold up to reality.
> have intentionally kept the block size at 1MB
The block size has already been lifted to 2MB-4MB with SegWit.
> Blockstream ... support the product they're attempting to develop (lightening network layers)
Lightning Network was invented by people that have nothing to do with Blockstream, who founded their own company for that: https://lightning.engineering/team.html
There are 5 different teams developing Lightning Network implementations. Blockstream is merely responsible for the C implementation, they have no special control over Lightning.
> It's a red herring to claim larger blocks increase centralization when it's just data storage.
It's not just storage; the main issues are bandwidth, latency and IBD time. There are very real engineering limitations and trade-offs that have been discussed in depth over the years that you're just brushing off here. It's not as simple as you make it appear.
There's a layer 2 technology called Lightning Network that lets you transfer Bitcoin almost for free and in seconds, no transaction number limit. The biggest issue is liquidity, it's not easy to move large sums in a single transaction, but that shouldn't matter much for micro-payments.
There's even ongoing work on making paid API's work seamlessly by adding some middleware, using the HTTP 402 (payment required) status code, no usernames/e-mails/passwords involved: https://lightning.engineering/posts/2020-03-30-lsat/
(And yes, LN is open source, non-custodial and moves real Bitcoin, not IOU's or other tokens. It's actually an open spec with at least 3 major implementations in 3 different languages.)
If you are into learning about cryptography, then some companies in the Bitcoin space might have opportunities for you:
https://coinkite.com/careers
Coinkite produces Coldcard, a hardware wallet. It's quite a masterpiece IMO. I've seen other postings on other jobs too.
https://lightning.engineering/join-us/
particularly:
https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/lightning/359ec80e-5f02-4300-b750-168033193440
https://blockstream.com/careers/
NOTE: I don't work for any of them. I do it as a hobby and enjoy the technical part of Bitcoin's protocol and has me on this never-ending rabbit hole on cryptography and retaking low-level languages, which has been a real treat for me.
Lightning Labs | all roles | Remote (global) | Full-time | https://lightning.engineering
At Lightning Labs, we develop software that powers the Lightning Network. Our open source, secure, and scalable Lightning systems enable users to send and receive money more efficiently than ever before. We also offer a series of verifiable, non-custodial Lightning-based financial services. We bridge the world of open source software and the next-generation of bitcoin financial software.
View open positions at https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/lightning
https://lightning.engineering/posts/2020-03-30-lsat/
finally, a sane solution for micropayments for content.
you can see a sort of proof of concept (pre-lsat, but using lightning) on yalls.org and a few other similar toe in the water type sites.
but I think if LSAT gets traction it has the potential to turn the content industry upside down.
it is still very very early days.