A Developers Aims to Bring Bitcoin Payments for Retail By Integrating Lightning Network With NFC Technology
One of the key areas where Bitcoin developers are working with all efforts is solving the scalability issue of the Bitcoin network. Lightning Network is the widely proposed solution in solving Bitcoin’s capability issue that allows for transactions to be taken off the Bitcoin blockchain thereby freeing up huge space in the Bitcoin network.
While that developers have been actively working on the Lightning Network, they are also experimenting with other designs that make the payment system easier to use. Developer Igor Costa has recently submitted a proposal to standardize a way of connecting the Lightning Network with the Near-Field-Communication (NFC) technology. The developer claims that it could make the transactions seeds very fast making Bitcoin available for everyday retail payments.
NFC is currently one of the widely used technology for contactless payments that lets the user pay for the item just by holding the smartphone a few inches away from the device it is paying to. NFC-based payments have become widely popular across Asia and Europe and can be made using not only smartphones but also using chips embedded in the payment cards.
On the other hand, as earlier said, the Lightning protocol aims at taking transactions away from the Bitcoin blockchain while adding them later on to the chain in the form of a bundle. This frees up the Bitcoin blockchain network thereby letting transactions occur quicker and cheaper. Litecoin founder Charlie Lee described this as “Fiat is to gold as lightning network is to Bitcoin.”
Cota sees a huge potential of using Bitcoin for daily transactions by combining these two technologies. Currently, Bitcoin transactions make use of QR codes. Cora in his post explains that “QR codes are a bit unwieldy and even more so if you want a nice HTML table description of your grocery shopping with hundreds of items – this relatively large amount of data makes them impractical to scan.”
Cota said that NFC doesn’t have this hurdle. He further added that: "I'd like to see a system where the payment terminal sends a nice HTML receipt for the customer - that receipt has, say, a table list of your grocery shopping with subtotal, taxes, grand-total, perhaps a shop logo, some loyalty code or a coupon for future use.”
By calling his Lightning wallet which uses NFC he wants the payments to be instant just like with the contactless cards in Europe. A user would simply tap on the payment terminal. Well, if this turns out to be successful it will be a major breakthrough of using digital currencies in daily transactions.