Yes, if you already have a direct channel opened to your friend. However you don't get to choose which route your payment takes. It may cross your friend's node, but it may also take an entirely different route.



As mentioned by Kakmakr, the whole idea behind Lightning Network is to have a multitude of interconnected nodes (ie. wallets with open channels) form a network of payment channels that can relay transactions without requiring 2 parties to be directly connected to one another -- as long as there is a viable path that transactions can take ie. as long as they are at least indirectly connected. That's the Network in Lightning Network.

There are people buying real, physical things paying with lightning already. Take this guy for instance, he paid $2.50 to fill the channel:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7rkunw/lightning_the_future_just_arrived_at_my_doorstep/

The problem is when you run out of money, you must refill the channel with another on-chain transaction, so this incentives people to put as much money as possible at once on the channel, something that may not be viable for most people. For example if you want to buy a router, let's say it costs $150 bucks.. well most people isn't going to put more than that, so you would already spend all of your channel's funds at once not saving money.

I wonder he did get such a low transaction for the on-chain one tho, $2.50 is super low even if you use segwit. He must have gotten lucky with a period of low mempool activity.

I agree on you too, it is really astonishing if it will be it's mechanics. I mean it's a too good to be true tech way back then but now it's implemented. But somehow i just think back if that's the case if it's more prone on open channel, does it mean it's also prone to future breaches or frauds? Just wondering..

68 nodes and 131 channels, just few more zero's after those numbers and we're ready to go. 

No. Just No.

Read the lightning paper: https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf

Awesome stuff. So the person opening the channel is the only one paying the fees?
If that's so that is going to be great.

I'd want to eventually figure it out and implement it on eCommerce solutions

Is there a way to run lightning without running a full bitcoin node?
I want to test a few things without having to use up a lot of bandwidth and space

I consider joining in and be #reckless. I have some design questions though. Under the premise that I mostly dont want to spend funds and want to help process transactions and establish cheap path's along the network. Currently the topology[1] looks to me like there are a couple main hubs and everyone else just attaches to them.
#1 (how connect?) What would be a good approach to establish alternative paths? Connect to all bigger hubs, e.g. all with x+ connections? Or rather establish a connection between other nodes within the network that are not already connected via a single hop?
#2 (resource requirements?) What (additional) resources are required? Has anyone data on this? I consider upgrading my server anyway, so this would be a good switching point.
#3 (minimal funds/channel?) The current total capacity is only(?) ~3.68 BTC (again according to[1]), what would be - in your opinion - a good amount to put aside per channel? As much as possible obviously, but at which point does it become too little? Considering I plan to invest X amount of BTC this "minimal amount" would limit the number of channel I could reasonably keep open.
#4 (is much work?) How much maintainance is needed? Funds would move between channels, but the main flow may be in a certain direction along the path. Because people just buy stickers instead of sending funds back and forth. Has anyone any experience with this yet?

Thanks in advance.

[1] thanks for the awesome graph here https://lnmainnet.gaben.win/ btw

The software is still in alpha. GUI will be better.

Adoption is easy once a foolproof wallet comes out.

Swap to eth that got hacked (remember dao) numerous times before while btc had zero issues? No thanks. I trust the core team more than Vitalik Buttcoin.

Let everything aside, eth has a CEO while bitcoin has none. Satoshi left the game but vitalik is still around can manipulate the markets with his words. If this is not centralization I don't know what is. Even Charlie Lee realized his mistake and sold his stash lately.