Lightning Boosts Bitcoin In El Salvador And Beyond

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The bitcoin capacity of the Lightning Network, Bitcoin’s layer 2 scaling solution, continues to reach new all-time highs every week. The network now hosts more than 2,400 BTC in more than 73,000 channels. Since bitcoin officially became legal tender in El Salvador on September 7, Lightning has seen nearly 2,000 new channels opened and an additional 100 bitcoins stored there.

A one-year window of the State of the Lightning Network by Bitmex Research.

As the network advances in functionality and usability and more people are made aware of the benefits of adopting the technology, it becomes more important in the Bitcoin ecosystem. As a result, it ends up hosting more BTC and stands as one of the definitive answers to the base layer scaling problem.

Bitcoin and Lightning together generate a positive reinforcement loop. Bitcoin education will naturally lead people to Lightning, which in turn increases the frequency of Bitcoin usage, given Layer 2’s emphasis on small payments. The easier it is to make cheap and fast payments with Bitcoin through Lightning, the more people will use Bitcoin, propelling it into an established medium of exchange.

El Salvador has played an important role in raising awareness and adoption of Bitcoin and Lightning, even beyond its borders. In addition to bringing both technologies to the center stage, the Central American nation has shown how using BTC to pay for a McDonald’s breakfast is not only possible, but also cheap and fast, providing proof of concept as well. other countries can operate.

The open infrastructure around Bitcoin and Lightning, compared to the closed one that surrounds the traditional banking system, allows for more efficient innovation. Plus, it allows citizens to choose the app, technology, and money they want to use for each use case in their daily life. Whether you want to save BTC and spend dollars or get started fully with a bitcoin standard, you can do as you see fit in El Salvador, thanks to Bitcoin and Lightning.

The Lightning Network, offered in 2015 and released in beta in 2018, has come a long way in terms of development and adoption. Ongoing developer dedication has ensured sustained growth in adoption and increased technical robustness, fueled by improved ease of use. Today, all an average person needs to access Bitcoin through Lightning is their cell phone, effectively achieving a good level of independence from traditional finance and being able to carry out value transactions effortlessly while not paying. virtually no charge for this. It doesn’t come without compromise, of course, but Bitcoin and Lightning also allow any user to climb the rungs of sovereignty and privacy at their leisure.

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