Blockstream Talk #3 - Lightning Network: Bringing The Digital Cash Narrative Back To The Forefront

Welcome to Blockstream Talk #3

Our conversation today is with one of the worlds leading experts on the Lightning Network, Dr. Christian Decker.

Christian is also known as "Dr. Bitcoin" because his dissertation was the first distributed computing PhD to focus explicitly on Bitcoin.

His work on duplex micropayment channels actually predates the Lightning Network paper, but in a bizarre twist of faith it ended up being caught in academic review and publication ended up following after the publication of the Lightning Network paper. 

In developer circles, Christian is seen as the inventor, or at least one of the inventors, of Lightning scaling solutions.  So really there's no better person to talk about the current state and the future of the Lightning Network. 

While investors have been looking at Bitcoin as a high-growth inflation hedge, but what's going on in El Salvador and how bitcoin is actually being used in emerging economies is really bringing the digital cash narrative back to the forefront.

So in this conversation, I was keen to get Christian’s views, not only the state of the Lightning Network now, but what could go wrong?

Is the Lightning Network ready for prime time and full integration - not into a platform or wallet - but into an entire economy?

As well as the role the Lightning Network in driving broader Bitcoin adoption in the years to come.

0:00 Intro

2:27 - What is the Lightning Network, and what problems is it trying to solve?

5:29 - Limitations of the Lightning Network

7:22 - Existing protocols tackling the scaling problem

9:54 - The blocksize war

11:34 - How Lightning interacts with Liquid

13:39 - Are the different Lightning implementations competing with each other?

15:52 - How far are we in terms of user adoption?

19:29 - The role of Lightning in Bitcoin´s ease of use

23:34 - Where is the biggest potential growth for Lightning in the next five years?

25:23 - The most important technical issues when scaling Lightning

28:12 - Why have exchanges been slow at integrating Lightning?

31:10 - What the implementation of Taproot and Schnorr signatures means for the Lightning Network

34:39 - Blockstream Greenlight

38:44 - Questions from the Blockstream Talk community on Twitter

50:23 - Exciting prospects for Bitcoin´s future