Bitcoin Magazine The Lightning Issue: Letter From The Editor

Bitcoin doesn’t scale.

That shouldn’t be read to mean that Bitcoin, the asset, or different ways to use it don’t scale. But Bitcoin’s blockchain does not scale. This is a fundamental and undeniable reality of its architecture. We’ve known this definitively since the Blocksize Wars (well, Bitcoiners have known this). Some people, such as James A. Donald — an anonymous cryptographer who was the first person to reply to Satoshi on the cryptography mailing list — and Hal Finney himself, knew this from the very beginning.

It is not possible for every person on Earth to have to receive, verify and retransmit the transactions of every other person on the planet. The notion that this is a viable idea is actually quite insane.

But thi

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