Archives/lnbook
2
0
Fork 0
mirror of https://github.com/lnbook/lnbook synced 2024-11-06 21:20:29 +00:00
Code Issues Projects Releases Wiki Activity

Merge pull request #315 from keblek/patch-1

Browse Source 
Update ch1 - minor phrasing
This commit is contained in:
Andreas M. Antonopoulos 2020-07-28 09:39:03 -04:00 committed by GitHub
commit c011c26703
No known key found for this signature in database
GPG Key ID: 4AEE18F83AFDEB23
1 changed files with 1 additions and 1 deletions
Show Stats Download Patch File Download Diff File Expand all files Collapse all files

2
01_introduction.asciidoc
View File

@ -12,7 +12,7 @@ While the bulk of this book is written for programmers, the first two chapters a
=== Motivation for the Lightning Network
As Bitcoin and the demand for transactions grows, the number of transactions in each block will increase until eventually hitting the block size limit. When blocks are full, excess transactions are left to wait in a queue. Many users increase the fees they're willing to pay in order to buy space for their transaction in the next block. At the same time, an increasing number of users are left behind. Their transactions, e.g. microtransactions such as common small spendings, are not economically qualified to be on the network. However, increasing block size simply shifts the problem to node operators, where each increase in blocksize results in a resource increase multiplied by an order of magnitude.
As Bitcoin and the demand for transactions grows, the number of transactions in each block will increase until it eventually hits the block size limit. When blocks are full, excess transactions are left to wait in a queue. Many users increase the fees they're willing to pay in order to buy space for their transaction in the next block. At the same time, an increasing number of users are left behind. Their transactions, e.g. microtransactions such as common small spendings, are not economically qualified to be on the network. However, increasing block size simply shifts the problem to node operators, where each increase in blocksize results in a resource increase multiplied by an order of magnitude.
Because blockchains are gossip protocols, each node is required to know and validate every single transaction that occurs on the network. Furthermore, once validated, each transaction and block must be propagated to the node's "neighbors", multiplying the bandwidth requirements. As such, the greater the block size, the greater the bandwidth, processing, and storage requirements for each individual node, effectively limiting the amount of scaling that can be done this way. Furthermore, scaling in this fashion has an undesirable side effect of centralizing the network by reducing the number of nodes and node operators. Since node operators are not compensated for running nodes, if nodes are very expensive to run, only a few well funded node operators will continue to run nodes.