Bitcoin (BTC) turned 10 years old recently, and if someone were to tell its founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, in 2008 that the new decentralized currency would still be thriving in 2019, he/she/they may assume that the experiment succeeded. However, an idea like Bitcoin is capable of existing even if it isn’t very effective at delivering on its promises, and it just so happens that a decade later, everyone is still knocking their heads against the very first criticism made in response to its white paper.
After Satoshi published Bitcoin’s white paper in 2008, the first person to comment on it publicly was James A. Donald, who opined to the anonymous author, “the way I understand your proposal, it does not seem to scale to the required size.” These were prescient words, yet Donald couldn’t have anticipated how sophisticated the blockchain would need to become to solve it. Bitcoin’s greatest hopes now reside in the Lightning Network (LN) and solutions like it. Even so, it seems as if LN itself may be a problem in search of a solution. Currently, the low rate of use means that operating nodes lose money when they process transactions while an average channel capacity sits at a mere 0.027 BTC (and the average node capacity is 0.216).