• Beyond the Main Network: Benefits and Challenges of the Layer 2 Blockchain
• Bitcoin Lightning Network: Danger for Visa and Mastercard?
• Brian Armstrong: a Lightning connoisseur?
Bitcoin enthusiast “Wicked” criticized Brian Armstrong on Twitter, the Coinbase CEO does not comment on the Bitcoin Lightning network. Armstrong even ignores Bitcoin Lightning, according to the Twitter user.
Advertising
Trade Bitcoin and other cryptos via CFD (also with leverage)
At Plus500 you can benefit from rising and falling crypto prices – also with leverage. Test the free demo account now!
Plus500: Please note the Hints5 to this advertisement.
My tweets auto-delete after some number of months, so there is no search history.
Lightning is great and something we’ll integrate.
– Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong) April 8, 2023
Lightning is great, it’s something that will be integrated, Brian Armstrong replied. Since his tweets are automatically deleted after a certain time, you can’t search them by topic – only for this reason no tweets about the Lightning Network can be found.
“Wicked” is not alone in criticizing Coinbase’s lack of Lightning integration. According to GitHub, other crypto exchanges such as Kraken or Bitfinex have already integrated the interface. But Coinbase competitor Binance has not yet implemented Lightning either.
Bitcoin Lightning integration: advantages and challenges
The currently most popular Layer 2 scaling solution “Lightning” was introduced in 2018 to enable faster and cheaper Bitcoin transactions. In Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin white paper published in 2008, there is already a sketch of a “peer-to-peer electronic cash” system, which is intended to make paying with Bitcoin simple, fast and inexpensive. However, since Bitcoin has developed into a kind of “digital gold” in recent years and its value has increased enormously, its property of protecting against inflation and storing assets came to the fore.
However, the acceptance of the Lightning network has been steadily increasing in recent years. According to estimates by Arcane Research, transactions worth 20 to 30 million US dollars per month should have been processed in the first quarter of 2022. That would be an increase of around 400 percent compared to the previous year. However, compared to the monthly turnover of large credit card providers, the turnover remains small.
Despite its popularity and the incredible transfer volume of bitcoin, the number of transactions is limited to seven per second due to the decentralized structure – high transaction fees and long waiting times have to be accepted. A layer 2 blockchain like Bitcoin Lightning can speed up the transaction enormously and reduce transaction fees. If it catches on across the board, it could even trouble payment giants like Visa and Mastercard, according to a recent Coinbase blog post. However, the post also references the technical issues with implementing Lightning and the network benefits of the credit card giants.
As early as 2016, Coinbase announced in an article that it wanted to support and promote Bitcoin scaling solutions. A Coinbase blog post last year, referenced by Blockchain.News, referenced roadblocks to a Lightning integration as they relate to technical issues as well as regulatory issues and compliance challenges. Above all, there is a lack of developer tools. Since Bitcoin is primarily viewed as an investment, user-friendly applications may not be a priority. The use of the Lightning network is therefore still cumbersome for new users, despite improvements in the infrastructure that have already been made. In addition, the integration of financially weaker users from developing countries into the network poses a challenge.
Lightning advocate David Coen sees the problem of Lightning integration for large trading platforms primarily in the business model of integrating as many Altcoins as possible. However, Coinbase already integrated Optimism’s Ethereum Layer 2 application with “Base” early last year.
Implementation of the Lightning network: reception in the community
Armstrong’s Twitter comment was mostly well received in the community, including by Bitcoin enthusiast and MicroStrategy founder Michael Saylor.
Nevertheless, there are also doubts about the seriousness of Brian Armstrong’s statements about the Lightning implementation. After calling on the community to share videos on the best use of cryptocurrencies in Africa, the Coinbase CEO announced that he would transfer the $100 reward offered to Bitcoin. According to the winner, however, this did not reach him. This could be because the recipient, Cointelegraph journalist Joseph Hall (@JoeNakamoto), provided a Lightning address for the transaction, which Brian Armstrong mistook for a “normal” email address. Bitcoin connoisseur Derek Ross then sneered that Armstrong needed “a lesson on Lightning.”
Editorial office finanzen.net
Leverage must be between 2 and 20
No data
Image sources: dencg / Shutterstock.com, Zecchi / shutterstock