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Timothy B. Lee — Bitcoin has a huge scaling problem—Lightning could be the solution

Summary:
Three startups are getting ready to launch one of the most ambitious and important cryptocurrency experiments since the creation of bitcoin itself. Called Lightning, the project aims to build a fast, scalable, and cryptographically secure payment network layered on top of the existing bitcoin network. Essentially, Lightning aims to solve the big problem that has loomed over bitcoin in recent years: Satoshi Nakamoto's design for bitcoin is comically unscalable. It requires every full node in bitcoin's peer-to-peer network to receive and store a copy of every transaction ever made on the network. Initially, that design was vital to achieving Nakamoto's vision of a fully decentralized payment network. But as Purdue computer scientist Pedro Moreno-Sanchez told Ars, it creates a big

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Three startups are getting ready to launch one of the most ambitious and important cryptocurrency experiments since the creation of bitcoin itself. Called Lightning, the project aims to build a fast, scalable, and cryptographically secure payment network layered on top of the existing bitcoin network.
Essentially, Lightning aims to solve the big problem that has loomed over bitcoin in recent years: Satoshi Nakamoto's design for bitcoin is comically unscalable. It requires every full node in bitcoin's peer-to-peer network to receive and store a copy of every transaction ever made on the network.
Initially, that design was vital to achieving Nakamoto's vision of a fully decentralized payment network. But as Purdue computer scientist Pedro Moreno-Sanchez told Ars, it creates a big challenge as the network becomes more popular. "We have reached a point where it's not suitable any more to keep growing," he said.…
A big hurdle in innovation is scalability. It's also fundamental to evolutionary theory. A lot of potentially good solutions fail because they are not scalable or as scalable as other solutions.

As an aside, neoliberal globalization is running into a scalability problem that its advocates are determined to overcome by force if necessary. That is increasingly the case as resistance rises from traditionalism

Ars Technica 
Bitcoin has a huge scaling problem—Lightning could be the solution
Timothy B. Lee
Mike Norman
Mike Norman is an economist and veteran trader whose career has spanned over 30 years on Wall Street. He is a former member and trader on the CME, NYMEX, COMEX and NYFE and he managed money for one of the largest hedge funds and ran a prop trading desk for Credit Suisse.

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