When Lightning strikes

If you’re anything like me, you’ve never used your Bitcoin to pay for real-life purchases. Up to today, the only thing I’ve settled with BTC are transaction fees to get my BTC from my exchange account into my wallet and vice versa. Maybe you’ve already bought stuff with BTC; if yes, I’d be intrigued to know what.Anyone transacting with Bitcoin for the first time will soon realize that it takes a few minutes, if not longer, for your transaction to be confirmed. What’s “worse” for small amounts the Bitcoin transaction fee is pretty high. Currently, to get your transaction verified within the next hour, you’d have to pay $8.88. If you just wanted to buy a coffee, clearly that’s disproportionally high. And having to wait 10 minutes until the transaction is confirmed, your coffee would be only lukewarm by that time.The root of the problem lies in the scalability problem. Scalability describes how many transactions a network can handle. Centralized payment providers like PayPal (150 transactions/second) and Visa (up to 5600 tps) can verify transactions within seconds, making them a convenient option for all of us to go about our daily purchases. However, as centralized networks, they’re susceptible to attacks, and customers are at their mercy.Bitcoin, created as peer-to-peer electronic cash, was set to change how we transfer value to a decentralized paradigm. More than ten years later, we’re still far from having all moved to use crypto. But, there’s some serious work being done to make Bitcoin easier to use for smaller payments — namely, the lightning network.First things first, if you’re still wondering why Bitcoin has a scalability problem when other cryptocurrencies such as Litecoin or Ripple don’t seem to. Bitcoin relies on Proof-of-Work, meaning that all nodes in the network are simultaneously racing to solve a riddle…