Bitcoin Lightning Network vs Visa and Mastercard: How do they stack up?
Bitcoin’s Lightning Network has been growing at a slow pace. What’s keeping it behind, given its high transaction throughput? Bitcoin (BTC) changed the world as a decentralized and non-governmental form of currency that can facilitate peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions that transcend national borders. But, despite this functionality, Bitcoin’s role as a payment mechanism has been called into question due to its low transaction throughput. The Bitcoin blockchain can handle up to seven transactions per second, which means that network demand has seen the average transaction fee on the network reach an all-time high above $62 during specific periods. In order to address low throughput and high transaction fees, developers made the Lightning Network — a layer-2 scaling solution that allows for off-chain transactions. The Lightning Network creates a P2P payment channel between two parties in a transaction. The channel “allows them to send an unlimited amount of transactions that are nearly ...