Lightning network is growing steadily

The essence of Bitcoin is instantaneous payments with next to nothing fees. While this is usually the banner of the Bitcoin community, when one delves deeper into the community, it can be seen that payments through Bitcoin are not actually free and are never processed instantly.

That might have disappointed a good handful of people. However, the claim was never a lie and theoretically, Bitcoin does provide instant payments and the fees should be negligible. But nobody had imagined that the Bitcoin network would ever reach the scale it has reached today.

In short, the whole scaling issue occurred because the designers never fathomed that Bitcoin would ever achieve this level of success. The blockchain of Bitcoin has a limited value. Due to the fact that every transaction needs to be authenticated by every node on the network, every transaction has to share the limited memory and the process is inherently slow.
A solution to the scaling issue is the Lightning Network. It was first proposed in 2014 by Poon and Thaddeus Dryja, who are two Bitcoin-obsessed engineers. The idea was bounced around the Bitcoin community for a while and finally materialized on Saturday. A user bought a VPN router with the help of Lightning Network. This might be the first ever physical item purchased through the LN.

In the last three days, the mainnet of Lightning Network has almost doubled its node count. Currently, there are around 107 nodes on the network. The total Bitcoin load on the network is somewhere around $19,000.

The Lightning Network has enjoyed a good start and is expected to improve further in the coming weeks. The Bitcoin community is wholeheartedly supporting the launch of the network and many businesses in the US are looking to use it for accepting bitcoin payments.

Most notably, pizzerias are looking for ways to adopt the Lightning Network. Currently, it seems like the network might be the solution that Bitcoin so desperately needs. The era of high transaction costs and long acceptance time might finally come to an end.