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About LNPlay

New to lightning? Need a good understanding of channel balancing, sending, and receiving before going live? Use LNPlay to learn lightning basics in a private test environment. You won't lose real money, but you can use a real lightning wallet: Clams Remote.

Want to play with lightning?

If you happened to catch a Lightning LARP at a bitcoin conference or meetup, you saw LNPlay in action. LNplay.guide is your resource for running your own lightning simulation.

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LNplay.live (under development) is the marketplace for purchasing a hosted LNPlay instance, which means little setup on your end with limitations on how many can play.

Playing with lightning means using a real wallet interface within a private test environment. LNPlay is the way to make lightning click with its next round of new users: those who are familiar with bitcoin but don’t use it yet for everyday transactions. Set up LNPlay the next time you get together with friends and family. Everyone who has a phone can participate in sending their first transaction over their dedicated lightning network.

LNPlay is for meetups, conferences, hackathons, and gatherings of all kinds. With a dedicated test environment, the lightning network is at your fingertips to test, teach, and hopefully expand. As an educational tool, the guide presented here is open-sourced to encourage further development.

Are you a lightning dev?

LNPlay is useful for development since you can deploy a bunch of core lightning nodes against a single bitcoind node. All of these core lightning nodes are configured to listen for commando-style RPC requests (REST/websocket). nginx terminates client TLS sessions and proxies them to the appropriate websocket/rest interface on the CLN container.

LNPlay is great for core lightning plugin development too. Your plugin code is made available all deployed containers so they can get all your latest plugin updates. Running a script will ensure all the CLN nodes register the latest updates to your plugins!

but what is lightning?

While Bitcoin is slowly dripping into the economic ecosystem, lightning is rushing ahead at the forefront of internet money. If you like the idea that bitcoin can make you a sovereign individual, then you may be excited to discover that lightning can make you a daily bitcoin user. Look around, there’s probably a cafe in your city that accepts bitcoin payments. To trustlessly accept small payments, this cafe will integrate with Lightning. So once you understand a little more about lightning, you can stroll on up there and send them sats for your sandwich.