On June 28, news emerged[1] that a study[2], conducted by Diar, suggested that the Lightning Network[3], which is being heralded as a potential way for Bitcoin to scale, is not as effective at routing payments[4] than was first believed.
The study’s overall claim was that “the reliability of successfully routing a payment on the Lightning Network is still quite low,” especially when it came to larger amounts.
However, experts in the know — including Bitcoin core developer Jonas Schnelli and core development contributor, Peter Todd[5], as well as the co-founder of Lightning Labs, Elizabeth Stark[6] — have all slammed this report.
The issue essentially comes down to the fact that Lightning is still very much — and very publicly — in beta testing, where developers put in place a temporary upper limit on channel funding amounts. However, the study has blown past the parameters of the beta test, questioning why it can’t run when it has not even begun to walk yet.
Riding the Lightning
The Lightning Network (LN) has been in development as a way to speed up blockchains which are suffering from scalability issues[7]. As blockchains get busier, so do their transactions slow down and are often caught in a backlog, which also raises fees, as miners[8] charge higher fees to put every single transaction on the blockchain.
What the LN is proposing to do is make it so that not all transactions are immediately recorded on the blockchain[9]. It involves opening up a payment channel between two parties who can instantaneously interact along that open channel as much as they want. It is only when the channel is closed that
