Australia's Bitcoin ATM Offers Lightning Network Capabilities

Understanding Bitcoin Lightning ATMs: Fast Transactions and Micro

The Australian city of Coolangatta has received its first Bitcoin ATM with integrated Lightning network features. The new ATM has been built at Coolangatta's The Strand shopping center and is now open to the public.

A Bitcoin Lightning ATM functions similarly to traditional Bitcoin ATMs but saves significant time due to the layer-2 Lightning solution's rapid transaction capabilities. It also enables the purchase of very small sums of BTC, usually in Satoshi (sats), Bitcoin's lowest denomination, where one satoshi equals 0.00000001 BT.

At the moment, cryptocurrency ATMs directly settle transactions on the blockchain. This has its own set of constraints. For example, as miner fees on the Bitcoin network skyrocketed between 2017 and 2018, operators were forced to react to batching transactions.

In fact, this implies that even if a person buys bitcoin through an ATM, it is not immediately transferred to them. The operator has mechanisms in place that allow it to wait for other ATM network users to use the machines before aggregating and sending out transactions to multiple users at once in a bulk transaction. A Lightning network can help to overcome this problem to a large extent.

As soon as cash is inserted, payment is made to the user via the Lightning network; there is no requirement for the operator to batch the funds as there is with Lightning. While it is unclear whether the fees will be significantly lowered, they will most certainly be lower than an on-chain payment.

The latest Lightning-enabled Bitcoin ATM installation in Australia comes after Australia surpassed El Salvador to become the world's fourth-largest Bitcoin ATM hub. By the year 2023, Australia had 216 ATMs.

The total number of crypto ATMs in the world is 38,602, with 6,071 deployed in 2022 alone.

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