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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 covered in this episode:
How Christian ended up writing the world’s first PhD on BitcoinThe vision of the Lightning NetworkHow the Lightning Network evolved in the last 4 yearsApproaching the 1.0 specificationThe current state of the networkWhy centralization concerns around hubs are often misguidedeltoo and the future of lightning networkThe case against other chains being better layer 1 networks than Bitcoin Episode 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 This episode was hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Sunny Aggarwal, and is availble on YouTube, SoundCloud, and our website.
