On this day in 2018, the first real purchase over the Lightning Network was sent for a TorGuard VPN subscription.

On this day in 2009, the first transaction ever broadcast over the Bitcoin network was sent by Satoshi Nakamoto to Hal Finney.

View the genesis transaction here.

Official release of the Lightning Network whitepaper by Joseph Poon and Thaddeus Dryja. The whitepaper proposes scalable off-chain instant payments using a decentralized system, whereby transactions are sent over a network of micropayment channels whose transfer of value occurs off-blockchain.

Read the Lightning Network whitepaper here.

Pseudonymous Twitter user hodlonaut began a game-like promotional test of the Lightning Network by sending 100,000 satoshis (0.001 bitcoin) to a trusted recipient where each recipient added 10,000 satoshis ($0.34 at the time) to send to the next trusted recipient. The "lightning torch" payment reached notable personalities including Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Litecoin Creator Charlie Lee, Lightning Labs CEO Elizabeth Stark, and Binance CEO "CZ" Changpeng Zhao, among others. The tweet that started the lightning torch.

The day that the Silk Road marketplace went online. A proof of concept for Bitcoin’s independence, censorship resistance, and pseudonymity, the Silk Road was an online black market and the first modern darknet market.