Like everyone here in this forum, we are anticipating that Bitcoin would be the future currency. If this is materialized, most of the early investors / current bitcoin users would definitely make a fortune if he/she holds lot of bitcoin in his portfolio. But the question is, what’s holding back the popularity of bitcoin at the moment? Of course, the first factor would be the Government’s restrictions (like what happens in China now). Besides that, I think lag in transfer/payment confirmation is also a big issue. There are many transactions which requires instant confirmation in order to work but common bitcoin transaction takes minutes or hours to confirm. How do current retailers adopt this payment system with such delay? Think would be a major setback if one wish to see bitcoin works as major currency in near future. So, is there any solution so far?
The answer is Lightning Network. LN transactions would be instant and with near-zero fees. Lightning network is a second layer network build on top of Bitcoin blockchain and it will use regular Bitcoin transactions to open channels with other Lightning Network participants that will have the previously mentioned features and even more. SegWit was the update necessary for launching Lightning Network, so it might be going live pretty soon. For more info read here -
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Lightning_NetworkThis is great. But does it works technically & without any loopholes? There must be some reason why it’s still not being implemented yet.
As for SegWit, it improves slightly on the transaction speed but still not able to do instant transfer. Imagine if the retailer is adopting Bitcoin payment, the cashier has to wait until the transaction is confirmed before closing the sales?