A Proposed Compromise to the Block Size Limit

Summary:

A concerned Adam Back has written an email to Gavin Andresen, expressing his worry about Gavin's lack of understanding regarding the basics of the Lightning Network. Adam feels that it is alarming because Gavin has been proposing to push the network into dangerous areas of game theory and lobby companies without having proper knowledge. He indicates that people are polite and respectful around here, but this behavior raises doubts about Gavin's ability to make informed trade-offs on block-size schedules in the future. The Lightning Network is a major candidate approach for Bitcoin to scale, and Gavin cannot push through a change without understanding the alternatives or greater ecosystem.In response to Adam's email, Gavin mentions that very few of his Bitcoin transactions fit the use-case where participants have semi-long lived payment endpoints. However, Mark Friedenbach believes that lightning usefully solves a problem where participants have semi-long-lived payment endpoints. Adam clarifies that the recipients benefit from keeping connections to hubs because if a hub goes away or a user abandons a hub, that tends to generate new on-chain traffic for balance reclaim and new channel establishment as they understand the limits so far. Gavin questions whether the Lightning Network is a scaling solution for the types of payments the Bitcoin network is handling today. In response, Adam says that the Lightning Network may well be able to handle those types of payments effectively. They don't know for sure how it will work until they see the balance and effectiveness of the network algorithms against usage, but there is good reason to see that BTC can recirculate and rebalance due to the reversible non-expiring channels and capitalization requirements can be lower than simple expectation due higher velocity and redistribution of fees to anyone with excess liquidity and connectivity heading in the right direction.

Updated on: 2023-06-10T01:23:29.329376+00:00