[2018-11-15] Bitcoin Lightning Network Reaches All-Time High Capacity

[cybersofts]

Efforts to improve the scalability of Bitcoin appear to be bearing fruit as the Lightning Network, a second layer off-chain scalability solution on the network designed to handle vast transaction throughputs without resulting in high prices has recorded an important milestone. According to data from 1ML, the Lightning Network now has a total of 4,039 nodes at press time, of which a total of 2,914 have public IP addresses.

Boom Time for Lightning Network
This marks the first time that the Lightning Network has exceeded 4,000 nodes, at a time when its total network capacity now stands at an all-time high of 134.42 BTC (about $760,454), barely two months after the network capacity figure crossed 100 BTC for the first time ever.

Following a September summit held in Melbourne, Australia, Lightning Labs developer Alex Bosworth revealed on Nov. 12, 2018, that a total of thirty changes would be implemented in the next version of the Lightning Network including multi-path payments, dual-funded channels, and hidden destinations, among other features.

It will be recalled that earlier this week, Lightning Labs co-founder Olaoluwa Osuntokun was featured on the latest Forbes 30-Under-30 list after the startup successfully raised more than $2.5 million for its commercial implementation of the Lightning Network to make bitcoin a more viable means of carrying out microtransactions in the manner of Venmo or Cash App.

Ref: https://cryptoslate.com/bitcoin-lightning-network-reaches-all-time-high-capacity/

[1Referee]

Feels good to see continuous progress on that front, especially when you take into consideration how poisonous miners can be.

Bitmain's attempt to point their miners from Bitcoin to BTrash caused Bitcoin's block times to slow down like 15%, and it's not nearly over, which affects pretty much every user and service. On a good note, this might actually speed up LN adoption because businesses are more likely to switch when they see no other option, and they are slowly but surely being pushed in a tight corner now.

LN deserves way more coverage, but that's not interesting enough for silly news outlets only out to cover negativity.