Episode Details

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
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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.