The Lightning Network can solve bitcoin problems, says Elon Musk

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, a former poster boy for Bitcoin And now his unwanted first person has said that the Bitcoin network can meet the growing demand if its users adopt it Lightning Network, Which is a payment network that makes Bitcoin transactions faster and cheaper.

“The energy use of Bitcoin mining is beginning to outpace that of medium-sized countries. It is almost impossible for small miners to succeed without these huge economies of scale,” he tweeted today. “For now, lightning is necessary.”

Lightning is software that handles Bitcoin transactions outside of the blockchain to ease the load on the network.

Without Lightning, it currently costs an average of $ 13 in fees and takes 14 minutes to transfer funds through the Bitcoin network.

With Lightning, money movements cost about 1 satoshi, which is the smallest unit of bitcoin (equivalent to 100 parts of a million bitcoins), and transactions are nearly instantaneous.

Lightning Labs, headquartered in Silicon Valley, began building Lightning in 2016. The company has Twitter and Square’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, among the investors. The protocol was launched in beta in 2018.

Critics argue that Lightning is sacrificing decentralization, as part of the computational work happening outside of Bitcoin’s main blockchain.

“Achieving truly decentralized funding – powering people – is a noble and important goal,” said Musk in response to BTCSession, an encrypted YouTuber who asked whether Musk had considered whether Lightning had sacrificed himself on decentralizing.

Musk, who attacked Bitcoin for its environmental impact and dependence on Chinese miners, is looking for cryptocurrencies that use less than 1% of Bitcoin’s energy consumption.

Dogecoin developers claim that the Tesla CEO offered funding to improve the network, which uses a fraction of Bitcoin’s energy consumption.