Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Merits 1 from 1 user
Re: Bitcoin Adoption and the Scalability Problem. What can normal users do to help?
by
Carlton Banks
on 14/03/2018, 11:47:16 UTC
⭐ Merited by ETFbitcoin (1)
LN is not activated yet.

It's not a soft fork, so it doesn't activate. Your statement therefore doesn't make any sense
So what's the right term to use here? And why the term 'activate' can only be used for soft forks?

Lightning is already running, but still in a beta form. The UX is fairly clunky and there are potential bugs in the various implementations. It's not ready for mainstream use yet.
I get that, if it was ready it would be "out?" (since I can't say activated :p ) already.

Activation implies a binary state, "on" or "off". With Lightning, judging "readiness" is more complicated than that. Lightning works now, there are (I think) around 1000 lightning nodes. But don't use it yet if you're neither technically adept, or willing to lose money.

As for when it's "out", that doesn't make sense either really. The Lightning protocol has been "out" since version 0.1 was published, but it was then (and remains now) a bad idea to use mainnet BTC on Lightning. Don't try to use it until at least 1 of the different Lightning wallet software developers officially submits finished client software to the public.


Even when LN is activated I don't know if it would solve things up.

The transaction capacity of Lightning is only really limited by it's BTC capacity & it's routing resolution. As long as the incentives work out, it could be so widely used that scaling will rival incumbent payment networks (Mastercard, Amex etc) and completely eclipse SWIFT. How much more capacity could Bitcoin need than that?
I read that:
Quote from: Bitcoin wiki
Lightning is 180 times (17,900%) more efficient than basic Bitcoin.
But please help me with this question, will LN be available for the normal user with a small internet bandwidth? or does it require certain setup?

Bandwidth will not be noticeably different to using your regular Bitcoin wallet software, if you have the internet connection to handle Bitcoin wallets now, you'll be fine.