Joseph Poon and Thaddeus Dryja are a duo of engineers looking to make smooth and hassle-free Bitcoin payments for services a reality.

Despite the dream goal for the Bitcoin technology always having been presented as a fee-less payment system, free of the financial limits and regulations of financial institutions, the cryptocurrency has always been sadly limited by its own technology.

The tech behind Bitcoin has placed limitations on people by only allowing for three to seven transactions every second, in contrast to the thousands of transactions prohibited each second by other tech payment methods.

Enter the Lightning Network, code that can support faster Bitcoin-based payment transactions, effectively solving the issues that Bitcoin presented. The Lightning Network potentially allows for fast payments without the fees of banks and other financial agencies.

In December, the Bitcoin-enthusiasts released the first version of the system, and crypto fiends will be excited to hear that the Lightning Network has successfully processed transactions, allowing developers to buy articles on Y\'alls, a micropayment website hosted by the developer Alex Bosworth, using their bitcoins.

The developer also recently tweeted to his followers on Twitter that he had used the duo\'s system to pay his own phone bill with crypto, stating that the future \"was almost here\". But how soon will that future be here for the rest of us? Could the Lightning Network be the next revolution in online payments?