Lightning Network: The Road to Scaling Bitcoin

When the Lightning Network (LN) was conceived in 2015, it was quickly embraced by the Bitcoin community as the way to dramatically scale Bitcoin’s capacity. There was an expectation of LN being available quickly. Instead, development proceed more slowly in the background with different teams contributing to a standard specification. That spec is now almost ready and last year interest and early activity on the LN increased dramatically.

We were joined by Christian Decker, a core engineer at Blockstream, where he works on their LN client. We discussed the history and progression of the LN and what remains on the road to scaling Bitcoin.

Topics:

• How Christian ended up writing the world’s first PhD on Bitcoin
• The vision of the Lightning Network
• How the Lightning Network evolved in the last 4 years
• Approaching the 1.0 specification
• The current state of the network
• Why centralization concerns around hubs are often misguided
• eltoo and the future of lightning network
• The case against other chains being better layer 1 networks than Bitcoin

Links:

• Lightning Network Whitepaper
• Christian Decker - Scaling Bitcoin with Duplex Micropayment Channels
• Joseph Poon & Tadge Dryja - Scalability and the Lightning Network
• Blockstream - Lightning Network
• A Simplified Update Mechanism for Lightning and Off-Chain Contracts
• Lightning Network Specifications on Github