Will the Crypto Community Torch Jamie Dimon?

The second was the growing interest within the crypto community around the Lightning Torch, an experiment launched on January 19 that's revealing aspects of both the technical and social functionality of the nascent Lightning network.

As communicated over Twitter using the hashtag #LNTrustChain, users who receive the torch's growing pool of bitcoin are asked to add 10,000 satoshis and pass it onto someone who they trust will send the torch to someone else.

Notwithstanding the sophisticated cryptography and protocol design behind JPMorgan's Quorum distributed ledger system and this digital currency implementation, I'd argue that the Lightning Torch users are working on a much bigger and more important problem.

The proof of that, ironically, lies in the fact that Lightning Torch is dealing in in small amounts.

It's one reason why Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, sees bitcoin eventually being the "Native currency" of the Internet and why, as an investor in Lightning development company Lightning Labs, he was one of the participants in the Lightning Torch relay.

There's no guarantee of success for Lightning, a so-called "Layer 2" solution to bitcoin's scaling and cost challenges that achieves greater efficiency by opening smart contract-controlled, peer-to-peer payment channels operated off-chain.

That's why experiments like the Lightning Torch relay, as trivial as they might seem to outsiders, are vital.

People involved in Lightning's development need to experience real-world functionality.

Bitcoin's initial success in building out a real-world community of users on the basis of similarly small-scale experiments is what ultimately put cryptocurrency, and later blockchain technology, onto the radar of the world's banks, and led them to explore aspects of that technology for their own usage - albeit by stripping out the more threatening, decentralized components.

As a community of users emerges around Lightning's decentralized payments model, how will banks and other incumbent institutions respond?