583 sats \ 2 replies \ @StanKozlovski OP 24 Nov 2022 \ on: Data Shows That Bitcoin’s Lightning Network Has Solved The Scalability Problem bitcoin
I enjoyed writing and researching this a lot.
A short summary:
  • scalability trilemma means BTC can't be scalable, secure and decentralized at the base layer
  • Bitcoin Cash, going the big block way route of 32MB blocks, can only do 50 transactions per second on the base chain
  • if you wanna scale via big blocks, you'd have 190TB of data a year to support 24,000 transactions per second. No node can keep this much, not to mention syncing
  • Lightning solves this beautifully
  • The default LND node is able to do 33 payments per second on a 8vCPU 32GB memory cloud machine
  • Assuming most Pis running LND can do 4 payments a second, the Lightning Network right now should be able to scale to 16,264 payments a second.
  • That number is 2.2x the average transactions from Visa in 2021, so more than enough to overcome them
  • At the same time, Lightning's transaction fee is 13 times less than visa. 0.1% vs 1.29%
  • Lightning hasn't even started prioritizing scalability or performance. Reliability has been at the forefront
  • As River shared, its payment success rate is 98.7% at an average payment size of $46. 4 years ago, Lightning had $5 transactions fail 48% of the time.
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/.image/c_limit%2Ccs_srgb%2Cq_auto:good%2Cw_700/MTkzOTM1NjA2NjU1NjI0ODgx/transactions-per-second.webp
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1 sat \ 1 reply \ @puhbuhruh 24 Nov 2022
Really interesting research, thank you! You might find this old report from Joost Jager at Bottlepay interesting re: benchmarking tps for a given node.
Would love to see somebody redo the analysis and see what the theoretical maximum looks like today!
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1 sat \ 0 replies \ @StanKozlovski OP 25 Nov 2022
Thanks! His reports are exactly what I was referencing.
I tried to be realistic with the numbers I presented. The benchmark you linked is more proof that higher throughput per node is achievable, but none of what he did has made its way to the implementations (with reason I suspect, there are tradeoffs at each point)
A benchmark from Bottlepay again, a month or so earlier than this one, showed that an LND node running decent hardware (8vCPU, 32GB RAM) can do 33 payments per second.
I wanted to estimate this in a realistic way given that most of the network is running Pis, and ran with the conservative "4 tps" number, which again proves more than enough!
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