Lightning’s Balancing Act: Challenges Face Bitcoin’s Scalability Savior
The bitcoin community has been discussing the concept of the Lightning Network for a year now. It is often cited in scalability debates as a solution to bitcoin's limited transaction throughput capabilities. However, it's a complicated concept and several parts of the implementation are still theoretical or in development. This article will attempt to provide more insight into how the Lightning Network will operate and the challenges it will face. The following assumes you have a basic understanding of Lightning Network. If you’re new to this concept then you can check out this explanation....
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With the halving looming and transaction capacity maxed out, some are predicting a doomsday scenario. Much, therefore, depends on the Lightning Network. A “decentralized network using smart contract functionality in the blockchain to enable instant payments” which is capable of an amazing “millions to billions of transactions per second” according to the Lightning Network’s website. The Lightning Network is a fairly old — in bitcoin terms — idea which makes use of bitcoin’s inbuilt script system allowing for trustless payments through intermediaries, but enforceable on the blockchain. In....
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