Apr 30, 2021
Location: Remotely
Date: Tuesday 27th April
Company: Block Digest, Suredbits
Role: Host, Software Engineer
Since Bitcoin’s inception, scaling has been a divisive topic. The very first reply to Satoshi Nakamoto’s email introducing the bitcoin whitepaper stated that “We very, very much need such a system, but the way I understand your proposal, it does not seem to scale to the required size.”
The scaling debate came to a head in the block size wars. Part of the community wanted to scale bitcoin by increasing the block size. However, a larger section believed that scaling was better handled on other layers, culminating in 2017 with the BCash fork.
Four years on and the market has decided that layered scaling is the preferred solution. Today, there are several approaches to off-chain settlement, and by experimenting with these on higher layers separate from the protocol, the security of Bitcoin can remain robust.
These different second layers offer additional functionality and programmability not found on the Bitcoin base chain, but they do come with tradeoffs. Users should consider who or what they are trusting, be it a peg, a federation, a protocol, or a combination.
In this interview, I talk to Shinobi, the host of Block Digest and Suredbits software engineer Nadav Kohen. We discuss Bitcoin scaling, the Lightning Network, wrapped Bitcoin and Liquid.