- The Bitcoin trilemma helps clarify why the blockchain has very low transaction speeds
- Enhancements in scalability can increase performance and promote BTC adoption
The newest Bitcoin [BTC] halving occurred on 19 April 2024. The blockchain’s mining reward was slashed to three.125 BTC, lowering provide and forcing miners to optimize their {hardware}. It additionally strengthened the shortage of Bitcoin, making it a viable various as a retailer of worth.
Michael Saylor, co-founder and former CEO of MicroStrategy [MSTR], realized how he may use this mechanism to his firm’s benefit in the course of the earlier cycle. In truth, he sees it as a hedge towards inflation.
To safe his treasury towards inflation, he’s not afraid to make use of leverage to purchase extra Bitcoin. “The only use of time is to buy more Bitcoin. Take all the money and buy more Bitcoin. Then take all your time to figure out what you can sell to buy more Bitcoin,” he stated in January 2024. The king of cryptos is up by practically 115% since then.
His legendary conviction helps the concept that increasingly more establishments would add BTC to their treasuries.
Past being an funding and inflation hedge, what do customers count on from the blockchain? What developments progressed in 2024, and what does 2025 probably have in retailer for BTC’s on-chain customers?
Bitcoin trilemma
The three key elements of a blockchain are scalability, decentralization, and safety. Scalability refers back to the capacity to course of transactions, decentralization is the distribution of decision-making and management throughout the blockchain, and safety is the community’s capacity to defend towards fraud and assaults.
Certainly one of Bitcoin’s main challenges is scalability. Its Proof of Work mechanism and the ever-growing hash fee imply that Bitcoin is very safe as a community. Decentralization can also be not one of many main drawbacks, though, over time, Bitcoin mining has turn into extra centralized because of the emergence and progress of mining swimming pools.
Supply: CoinLedger
The Bitcoin blockchain can deal with about 7 transactions per second (TPS) whereas Ethereum [ETH] and Solana [SOL] stand at 15 and a pair of,600 TPS, respectively. That is the blockchain trilemma. The idea highlights the trade-offs between safety, decentralization, and scalability.
So as to have a excessive throughput, networks should sacrifice safety or decentralization and decide to have fewer nodes to allow a better TPS. In the meantime, extremely decentralized networks battle with effectivity and velocity.
Options to the scalability downside
Over time, the recognition and variety of customers on the Bitcoin community are prone to improve. This is able to result in better person demand, and will additionally spark a necessity for the blockchain to boost its utility and worth to a person.
As a Layer 1, Bitcoin is constructed to have a low TPS and a restricted variety of use instances in comparison with chains like Ethereum or Solana which boast a strong decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem. To attain scalability and help extra advanced purposes, the community has to look in direction of Layer 2 options.
Layer 2 options are constructed on prime of an present blockchains and don’t want a network-wide consensus to deploy, in contrast to Layer 1 options. This makes them a extra versatile and engaging resolution choice.
Among the present Layer 2s are Lightning Community, Stacks, and Merlin Chain. Stacks goals to convey good contracts to Bitcoin with out altering the unique protocol. Initially known as Blockstack, it was rebranded in October 2020. Stacks is a Bitcoin Layer for good contracts, extending the community’s utility to incorporate good contracts, DeFi, NFTs (non-fungible tokens), and dApp (decentralized software) functionalities.
Lightning Community and its potential in 2025
Lightning Community was proposed in 2015 and has been operational since 2018. It goals to extend transaction speeds and scale back prices by permitting transactions to happen off the principle blockchain.
And but, it faces some challenges. The Lightning Community permits customers to switch by creating channels between them that may stay open for additional funds. It slashes the transaction charge, bringing it to the area of $0.001 from the present $2.8 value per transaction, and permits its completion in seconds.
LN had round 15,000 and practically 54,000 cost channels as of August 2024, with a channel liquidity of simply over 5,000 Bitcoin. It has seen the implementation of varied new wallets similar to Muun and Phoenix that enhance the person expertise. Rising adoption throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America makes e-commerce extra viable. LN utilization is boosted by entities similar to Bitrefill, a cryptocurrency reward card retailer, and OpenNode, a cost processor that allows retailers to simply accept BTC as cost.
In 2025, Lightning Community’s enlargement to make use of stablecoins for cost other than BTC would assist obtain mass adoption. This integration with stablecoins can result in real-world funds utilizing crypto stablecoins and might enable international alternate transactions to be settled virtually immediately anyplace throughout the globe.
Past Layer 2s
The way forward for Bitcoin Layer 2 options is stuffed with potential, however there’s a additional evolution attainable. Layer 3 options constructed on prime of Layer 2 scalability intention to boost interoperability and application-specific performance.
Layer 3 can allow customizable performance by tailoring for particular wants, and optimizing efficiency and effectivity. They will seamlessly join totally different blockchains and totally different Layer 2 options, thereby increasing the chances of blockchain know-how.
One instance of a Bitcoin Layer 3 is Impervious, the browser constructed on prime of Bitcoin. It’s decentralized, and all information transmitted is completed so privately, leaving no house for information surveillance. Additionally it is censorship-free.
It makes use of the Lightning Community to course of transactions, which implies that messaging and sharing paperwork will probably be finished virtually immediately and later submitted to the blockchain. This is able to levy a charge for every transaction, however privateness could possibly be value it.
One other instance of a Layer 3 resolution outdoors of Bitcoin is Cosmos. It was designed to handle the cacophony of blockchains by integrating them into an “internet of blockchains”. It affords safe information switch between unbiased blockchains, and sharding is used for scalability. This enhances the potential for dApps by enabling the usage of property and functionalities from totally different blockchains.
Learn Bitcoin’s [BTC] Value Prediction 2024-25
Bitcoin Layer 2 options can reshape the utilization of the blockchain. By boosting decrease transaction charges and quicker speeds, it fosters adoption by the general public even for micropayments and informal spending. Developments alongside this path would imply that Bitcoin is not only a retailer of worth, however would even be a sensible medium for alternate – Because it was initially envisioned.
