Summary
As a currency, bitcoin faces major problems with its transaction speed, which if left unaddressed can limit bitcoin's potential.
The Lightning Network will address bitcoin's scalability issues, allowing for instant payments with low fees.
A successful implementation improves the long term outlook of bitcoin's valuation.
Bitcoin's Scalability Problems
Many people believe that bitcoin is the future of our financial system. But there is a big issue standing in the way of this goal, and that is scalability.
Currently, bitcoin's network can only process a maximum of 10 transactions per second. In reality, the network only handles around 4 to 5 transactions per second, as 10 transactions per second is only a theoretical maximum under optimal conditions. Compare bitcoin's limitations to VISA or PayPal. Visa handles on average around 2,000 transactions per second, with a daily peak rate of 4,000 transactions per second. VISA has a peak capacity of 56,000 transactions per second; however they never actually use more than a third of this even during peak shopping periods. PayPal handles on average 10 million transactions per day for an average of 115 transactions per second.
As a result of bitcoin's relatively low maximum transaction speed, bitcoin keeps a large backlog of unconfirmed transactions, leading to a multitude of problems, including long transaction confirmation times and high transaction fees.
Clearly the main blockchain isn't very scalable. But as it turns out, it doesn't have to be. The community has come up with a new technique called the Lightning Network to solve the scalability issues. The key idea is that small and everyday transactions don't have to be stored on the main blockchain. This bypasses the 10 transaction per second limit and is also called the off-chain approach.
Lightning Network
The Lightning Network is a proposed solution to the bitcoin scalability problem. The network would use an off-chain protocol and is currently under development. It would feature a P2P system for making micropayments of digital cryptocurrency through a scale-free network of bidirectional payment channels without delegating custody of funds or trust to third parties.
**Martin YK Li **
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4133695-lightning-network-means-future-bitcoin
As with all technology, speed kills. Remeber dial up modems? Lightning network is a band aid for old tech. There is much better cryptos now that operate so much faster and cheaper.
I love Bitcoin and how it brought about a whole new marketplace. But first generation always gets replaced and the same will happen here.
Keep that in mind when you are investing and checking prices on your iphone X or galaxy 8, not the first version of the phones:)
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zhawk27 Interestingly you are one of thousands to claim "better tech" will replace Bitcoin, yet you have zero examples. Which coins are you talking about actually?
Ok first of all: you cannot compare phones with money and payment systems. Bitcoin is infrastructure and store of value. I still see TCP/IP being the core of internet now after 25 years. HTML still dominates the web. Phones are end consumer products, they are screens. If you switch your television you still see the same channels. Same with phones. I cant imagine replacing Swift or PayPal or Visa to something "better" every other year. Phones might hold your private pictures, but they don't hold your money or life savings. Trust has a lot more to do with it. Would you just jump to a new and completely unknown bank with your money because it has "better tech"? Would you switch to use some other payment network that was just released where you don't know if your payment would go through or just disappear? False, nobody wants to risk their hard earned money on unproven immature tech. Nor do they want to use something that no one else uses. This is what competitors of Bitcoin is up to. Same way Bitcoin is fighting traditional banking and payment systems for 9 years. It takes time.
And since you probably didn't understand the article you are commenting. Lightning network is an actual scaling solution. Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin is just fast because of different parameters. Tweaking of block size and block time is something a child can do, it is not innovation. It is not a solution to scale a crypto currency. It's config options. Like the preferences menu.
If you talk about IOTA and XRB, those are just unproven tech, maybe promising, maybe not. If you talk about Steem yes Steem and Bitshares is very fast, cheap and scalable. If you talk about XRP then God help your soul. Or maybe you talk about XYZ coin that was released yesterday with a glorious web page and a stunning white paper.
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