Learn Lightning from people who run it
Most Lightning education is either a protocol specification nobody reads or a blog post from 2019. This sits in the middle: practical, current, and grounded in what actually happens on the network rather than what the docs say should happen.
Everything here is free and nothing is gated. There is no certificate, no credential and no accreditation of any kind — see the footer, where that is stated plainly, because the name invites the question.
What makes it worth reading rather than skimming is the second section below. When a page here says what something costs, the number came from a machine that measured it, and the page shows you the date, the window, the sample size and the method.
- What capital costs, in bitcoin −0.66 % a year · as of 2026-09-11 23:44 UTC current
The course
Four strands, numbered so a citation can name one: LN 100 fundamentals, LN 200 payments, LN 300 liquidity and fee policy, LN 400 operations. Each strand is a reading order, not a syllabus you enrol in — start anywhere, stop anywhere, and nothing is recorded.
- LN 100 · Fundamentals What a channel is, what it can and cannot do, and why every later constraint follows from those two answers. Seven lessons, foundations only, no node required.
- LN 300 · Liquidity & Fee Policy What liquidity costs, what it earns, and how to set a fee policy you can defend. Seven lessons; three of them carry measured figures rather than described ones.
Where the material comes from
Foundations pages adapt Mastering Bitcoin and Mastering the Lightning Network, both released under CC BY-SA 4.0 with their publisher's approval. Every page that adapts them names the work, the chapter, the licence and what was changed, before the first sentence of adapted prose rather than in a footnote.
Measured pages adapt nothing. They are original work on data this operator collects, they do not inherit the share-alike obligation, and their figures are dedicated to the public domain so anyone can cite them.
Content is drafted with AI assistance and reviewed before publication. Anything touching keys, backups, force-closes or recovery is read line by line, and those pages say so.