Author: Gavin Andresen 2015-06-28 17:29:10
Published on: 2015-06-28T17:29:10+00:00
In an email conversation, Mark Friedenbach suggested that the Lightning Network solves a problem where participants have semi-long lived payment endpoints. Gavin Andresen disagreed with this statement and pointed out that very few personal Bitcoin transactions fit this use case. He added that very few personal dollar transactions also fit this use case, except for Starbucks payment cards. He further explained that payment channels between big financial institutions as a settlement layer could lead to centralization concerns, which is the reason why people are worried about increasing max block size. If there are only a dozen or two popular hubs, then it would be much worse centralization-wise compared to a few thousand fully-validating Bitcoin nodes. Although he thinks the Lightning Network is a fantastic idea and great experiment, he does not believe it is a scaling solution for the types of payments that the Bitcoin network is handling today.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T01:23:12.938006+00:00