Chapter 3: How the Lightning Network Helps Blockchains Scale
by Bruno Škvorc
This introduction to the Lightning Network was originally published at Bruno’s Bitfalls website, and is reproduced here with permission.
Bitcoin is currently impractical to use because of slow and expensive transactions plaguing its blockchain. Most people use it as a store of value (the digital gold fallacy) or to trade on exchanges. A concept known as the Lightning Network was introduced as a solution to this scalability issue.
The Basics of the Lightning Network
The Lightning Network was first described in a 2015 whitepaper by Joseph Poon and Thaddeus Dryja. The concept, however, was actually introduced by Satoshi Nakamoto in an email to Mike Hearn in 2013.
The Lightning ...
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