The capacity cliffThis article analyses some proposed alternatives to raising Bitcoin’s network capacity, specifically, the Lightning network. But the arguments made are general and could apply to other proposed alternatives too.
Firstly, a bit of background.
Many years ago Satoshi Nakamoto added a quick hack to the Bitcoin source code. He artificially limited its capacity to avoid a rogue miner causing problems for people in an era when using Bitcoin meant downloading the entire chain, with a slow and unoptimised client.
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Quite simply, we are out of time. There are no credible technical proposals that could gain widespread adoption within the next twelve months, beyond simply raising the capacity on the existing system, which is well understood and implemented by everyone already.
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Some people seem to think that if we hit Bitcoin’s capacity limits, there will be a smooth rise in fees and the free market will sort everything out. This is incorrect. In my next article, I’ll write about what will actually happen if we don’t fix this problem in time.
https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-capacity-cliff-586d1bf7715e
