Business

Scaling up

Is the Lightning Network the answer to Bitcoin’s scaling problems?

22 February 2019

 Bitcoin turned 10 at the beginning of the year. It was January 3, 2009 when Satoshi Nakamoto mined the first block of the Bitcoin blockchain, known as the ‘genesis block’. It’s hard to think of another person who has prompted so much media speculation without anyone knowing their identity. And we’ll probably never know definitively. But their identity aside, the protocol is alive and well, and the milestone is one to be celebrated. It’s also hard to think of a system only just into double figures that has had such a profound effect on people’s thinking and processes. It’s a sharply divisive topic, and one that has caused many false promises and projections. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard prophecies of its demise.

Bitcoin was first envisaged as a peer-to-peer payment system, but despite the fact that you don’t need a trusted party, it’s pretty slow, at least at the moment. It’s most often compared, unfairly, I think, to the Visa network, which can handle thousands of transactions a second, while the Bitcoin blockchain can process less than 10.

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