Bitcoin Magazine Bitcoin Layer 2: The Key To Scaling Bitcoin
Bitcoin, and for that matter all blockchains, do not scale. It is a fundamental limitation of blockchain based systems that they are incapable of facilitating transactional use at a truly global scale without completely sacrificing the decentralization and verifiability that make them valuable in the first place.
This has been an existential issue that Bitcoiners have grappled with from the very beginning of Bitcoin. This is a comment from James A. Donald, a Canadian cypherpunk who was the first person to reply to Satoshi’s original post on the cryptography mailing list:
Satoshi Nakamoto wrote:
“The bandwidth might not be as prohibitive as you think. A typical transaction would be about 400 bytes (ECC is nicely compact). Each