Thoughts on using Bitcoin with Interledger

[Guest]

From Adrian Hope-Bailie of Ripple:

https://medium.com/@ahopebailie/thunder-lightning-and-interledger-ceae9b5d92b4

Quote

It’s still very early to tell, but on first appraisal, it looks like Blockchain hastaken a great stride in fixing a major limiting factor of Bitcoin and one that made it very difficult to use Bitcoin with Interledger; transaction speed.

Quote

Previously it would have been very difficult to route Interledger payments through a Bitcoin ledger (due to the slow time to clear) so a working implementation of Lightning is a big deal. Because Interledger is neutral, it gives no preference to any ledger or network. That means that payments will route through ledgers or networks that offer the best capabilities such as speed, cost and trustworthiness.

Bitcoin excels in many of these areas except speed and so it has been difficult for anyone to realistically build a ledger adapter for Bitcoin to support Interledger. It has always been technically possible, but why would anyone ever have routed payments via Bitcoin if that link in the chain delayed the whole payment from completing?

The promise of Thunder is a new high-speed low-cost route for payments, that are settled via Bitcoin and that could form a very competitive link in a chain of Interledger payments.