Lightning Network Explained
The Bitcoin Lightning Network is an autonomous solution that’s signaled as the key to all problems keeping Bitcoin from mainstream implementation. It claims to solve the bleak scaling problem, make instant transactions, keep transaction fees minuscule, and take your transactions off the blockchain . In this article, we’ll discover what the Bitcoin Lightning Network really is, how it can make the guarantees it provides, and its current state. Bitcoin has a scaling problem. Bitcoin is designed to store all transactions in a data structure called a block. A block contains information about the previous block, miscellaneous data about mining rewards, and most of the block is just transaction data. Blocks are also fixed at a maximum of 1 MB in size. This last bit is where the trouble is. Because blocks are 1 MB in size, and a block is created every 10 minutes, assuming the transactions are not SegWit (coming up later) the network can process a maximum of between 3....