Share this article
Bitcoin Coders Send International Lightning Payment Over Ham Radio
In what appears to be a first-of-its-kind transaction, developers have successfully sent a bitcoin lightning payment over radio waves.
Updated Feb 21, 2023, 3:38 p.m. Published Mar 4, 2019, 9:15 p.m.
Make us preferred on Google
In what appears to be a first-of-its-kind transaction, two developers working in separate countries have successfully sent a bitcoin lightning payment over radio waves.
Organized over Twitter this past weekend, the transaction was sent by Rodolfo Novak, co-founder of bitcoin hardware startup CoinKite, to developer and Bloomberg columnist Elaine Ou. The completed payment effectively moved real bitcoin from Toronto, Canada, to San Francisco, California.
STORY CONTINUES BELOW
Don't miss another story.Subscribe to the Crypto Daybook Americas Newsletter today. See all newsletters
While radio technology is most commonly used for broadcasting music or talk radio, it's actually capable of much more than that. As the two developers showcased, radio can also be used to boost the resilience of the bitcoin network.
“Bitcoin is making ham radio cool again!” Ou tweeted after sending the transaction to Novak, referencing "ham radio," the use of radio by hobbyists who fiddle with radio technology.
But sending bitcoin over radio isn’t just fun. Some researchers argue it actually has a necessary use case.
In fact, the idea itself is the brainchild of Nick Szabo, inventor of the smart contract. Ou and Szabo presented the idea in 2017 at the Scaling Bitcoin conference in San Francisco, arguing at the time that it could help bitcoin build resistance to partition attacks researchers argue could potentially be used to attack the network.
The idea is that, while the internet can potentially be censored, it’s not the only form of technology that can be used to send data from one part of the world to another, "in case China decides to censor bitcoin via the Great Firewall, or places like North Korea where there is no internet at all," as Ou put it in an email to CoinDesk.
Technology infrastructure startup Blockstream licensed satellites that beam bitcoin to users around the world for similar reasons. Still, there are limits to the concept.
"It was a fun demo, but obviously unrealistic because we coordinated everything online before sending the radio signals," Ou acknowledged.
She continued:
"The equipment is currently the hard part: You need a radio that supports these frequencies. The cheapest way is with a software-defined radio, which is about $200 for something that can transmit low-power signals, or thousands for a high-power transmitter."
Old radio image via Shutterstock
More For You
Pudgy Penguins is building a multi-vertical consumer IP platform — combining phygital products, games, NFTs and PENGU to monetize culture at scale.
What to know:
Pudgy Penguins is emerging as one of the strongest NFT-native brands of this cycle, shifting from speculative “digital luxury goods” into a multi-vertical consumer IP platform. Its strategy is to acquire users through mainstream channels first; toys, retail partnerships and viral media, then onboard them into Web3 through games, NFTs and the PENGU token.
The ecosystem now spans phygital products (> $13M retail sales and >1M units sold), games and experiences (Pudgy Party surpassed 500k downloads in two weeks), and a widely distributed token (airdropped to 6M+ wallets). While the market is currently pricing Pudgy at a premium relative to traditional IP peers, sustained success depends on execution across retail expansion, gaming adoption and deeper token utility.
More For You
U.S. listed bitcoin, ether ETFs bleed nearly $1 billion in a day
U.S.-listed spot bitcoin and ether ETFs saw one of their worst combined outflow days of 2026 as falling prices, rising volatility and macro uncertainty pushed investors to cut exposure.
What to know:
- U.S.-listed spot bitcoin and ether ETFs saw nearly $1 billion in outflows in a single session, as crypto prices tumbled and risk appetite faded.
- Bitcoin dropped below $85,000 and briefly neared $81,000, while ether fell more than 7%, prompting heavy redemptions from major ETFs run by BlackRock, Fidelity and Grayscale.
- Analysts say the synchronized ETF selling reflects institutions cutting overall crypto exposure amid rising volatility, hawkish Federal Reserve expectations and forced unwinding of leveraged positions, though some see the move as a leverage shakeout rather than the start of a bear market.
