This fork applies (almost) all active pull requests for things like small typos and asciidoctor building corrections as of 2023-11-10.
Also included are build instructions for building the book in HTML and EPUB formats as well as a prebuilt EPUB.
STATUS: First Edition published on Dec 21, 2021
Mastering the Lightning Network is an O'Reilly Media book, by authors Andreas M. Antonopoulos (@aantonop), Olaoluwa Osuntokun (@roasbeef), Rene Pickhardt (@renepickhardt). It was published on Dec 21, 2021, in paperback and e-book, by O'Reilly Media. It is available everywhere that books are sold. This repository contains the manuscript of the book as published by O'Reilly Media, tagged as firstedition_firstprint.
The book describes the Lightning Network (LN), a Peer-to-Peer protocol running on top of Bitcoin and other blockchains, which provides near-instant, secure, micro-payments.
The book is suitable for technical readers with an understanding of the fundamentals of Bitcoin and other open blockchains.
- Part 1 - Intro
- Introduction
- Getting Started
- How the Lightning Network Works
- Lightning Node Software
- Operating a Lightning Network Node
- Part 2 - Intro
- Lightning Network Architecture
- Payment Channels
- Routing on a Network of Payment Channels
- Channel Operation and Payment Forwarding
- Onion Routing
- Gossip and the Channel Graph
- Pathfinding and Payment Delivery
- Wire Protocol: Framing and Extensibility
- Lightning's Encrypted Message Transport
- Lightning Payment Requests
- Security and Privacy of the Lightning Network
- Conclusion
This book is written using the open source asciidoctor mark up language. To build the book locally you can install asciidoctor through your package manager or by following the steps found at
https://asciidoctor.org/
To build the book, on a command line you can type
asciidoctor *.asciidoc -D output
and then copy the image files in with
cp -r images/ output/
The generated files will now be found in the output folder and can be opened in a browser.
An EPUB versions of the book can be built using asciidoctor-epub3 and the provided index file lnbook.asciidoc
asciidoctor-epub3 lnbook.asciidoc -o 'Mastering the Lightning Network - Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Olaoluwa Osuntokun, René Pickhardt.epub'
This will produce a single EPUB book named Mastering the Lightning Network - Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Olaoluwa Osuntokun, René Pickhardt.epub.
The cover page is not included in the EPUB due to being copyrighted by O’Reilly.
A prebuilt .epub file is also available Mastering the Lightning Network - Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Olaoluwa Osuntokun, René Pickhardt.epub
Mastering the Lightning Network is released under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 4.0 license. The full terms of the license can be found here:
Mastering the Lightning Network by Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Olaoluwa Osuntokun, Rene Pickhardt is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://github.com/lnbook/lnbook.
This "Free Culture" compliant license was approved by our publisher O'Reilly Media (http://oreilly.com), who understands the value of open source. O'Reilly Media is not just the world's best publisher of technical books, but is also a strong supporter of this open culture and the sharing of knowledge.
Thank you O'Reilly Media!
The current license permits derivative work, such as independent translations and the production and circulation of PDF, HTML or other derivative renderings of the source ASCIIDOC. The license does not extend to O'Reilly Media intellectual property, such as the cover page.
If you are interested in translating this book please see TRANSLATING.md