My short piece on the Lightning Network's scalability has just been published!

In it, we revisit big blocks, recognize how absurd they are, and do a data-driven victory lap proving that Lighting was the right solution.

bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/lighting-network-makes-bitcoin-scalable

Allow for a short summary thread:

First, about big blocks. Never forget how insiders tried to push for this increase (gist.github.com/travisbrown/ef999d98e9f79c05221bebb36563e3ec)

A flawed model to begin with, to support 24k/s on the base chain, your node would grow by *190TB* of data a year and it'd need 48/Mbps network bandwidth.

Centralization

Bitcoin Cash was born as a hard fork.

The result? An utter failure.

It increased its block size by 32x to 32MB - and as a result of that, can only scale to around 50 transactions per second (nothing close to the 200/s they mention) gist.github.com/stanislavkozlovski/ccdcd6c78c5ae7c059f8092621f9b70e

Doesn't scale!

Lightning fixes this ©

Assuming a realistic throughput of 4 max payments per second per node (these nodes are typically Raspberry Pis), Lightning scales to 16,264 payments per second today.

That's 2.2x Visa's 2021 average!

But wait, there's more

Lightning's average transaction fee is *13 times less* than Visa's - 0.1% vs 1.29%

All of this while preserving the qualities of Bitcoin - permissionless, scarce, portable, verifiable, decentralized, censorship-resistant, organic network effect, sovereign

And it hasn't even begun to scale yet.
- responsible development: up until Aug 2020, channel sizes were limited to just 0.167 BTC (~$1202 per 2019 price) out of developer caution
- not enough engineers and more pressing problems means other things get prioritized

As an example, reliability has MASSIVELY improved.

The earliest publicly available data from 2018 shows that $5 transactions would fail ~50% of the time.

As of a month ago, @River reported that their payment success rate is 98.7% at an average payment size of $46!

In stark contrast to today's "crypto", Lightning is an incredibly promising technology, and is very likely to see major adoption in the upcoming years.

I would advise anybody interested in the space to contribute to it.

And I extend a huge thank you to everybody that has.

I think this piece is important, sharing some realistic numbers that I haven't seen elsewhere in an easily-digestible manner.

Allow me to tag a few people I think would appreciate this, in order to share the message.

Lightning plebs and OGs I follow:
@alexbosworth @LNcyberhub @NordlysLN @Leishman @RandomJoeT @zerofeerouting @benthecarman @indomitorum @JaimeLoopz @derekmross @piramida @RunwithBitcoin @Machankura8333 @smallworlnd @callebtc @ZoltanAB @devzorLN @k00bideh @dannydiekroeger @jokoono

@SeverinAlexB

and a few others who might like this:
@davidmarcus @jespow @Nneuman @americanhodl8 @DzambhalaHODL @brian_trollz @_Checkmatey_ @MonetaryWonk @bradmillscan @arikaleph @heavilyarmedc @BitcoinBarnOwl @diopfode