WHAT IS BITCOIN LIGHTNING
One often reads comparisons between a Bitcoin transaction and a Visa transaction. Comparisons are made in terms of costs, transaction times and power consumption. But this comparison is wrong. The Bitcoin Blockchain (Layer 1) was not intended to be a highly scalable payment system. A decentralized system must reconcile three points: security, decentralization and scalability. On layer 1, the focus is on maximum security and maximum decentralization and the scalability that is possible in this regard. You will not pay for a pack of chewing gum with bitcoins on layer 1. A Bitcoin transaction can definitely not be compared to a credit card payment. If you really want a comparison, moving a ton of gold from Zurich to New York is the most obvious. The fact that Bitcoin can only handle a certain number of transactions per second has not been an oversight. The inventor was well aware that a higher throughput was needed for a payment system. It wasn’t Satoshi’s idea to store every lollipop sold on a blockchain. Why should you write something in the blockchain that you pay for unregulated with cash today? That makes absolutely no sense and costs far too much (electricity, money, time).
Bitcoin’s payment system is on layer 2. It is massively scalable and transactions are almost free and require practically no electricity at all. It does, however, compromise on decentralization. However, this is not a problem, because a transaction of 100 CHF does not have the same requirements as the storage of billions of Swiss francs. The whole thing is called the Lightning network.
In the meantime, you can already pay with the Lightning network in various places. This works exactly the same as with Twint. Simple, convenient, zero cost and absolutely instant.
So Bitcoin is more of a safe for at home, while Lightning is the wallet that you have with you.
The term Satoshi is often used in connection with the Lightning network. This is the smallest monetary unit. 1 bitcoin equals 100,000,000 satoshis. At the moment, one centime is equivalent to about 50 satoshis.
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