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 solutionTimothy B. Lee
