The crypto evangelist believes the lightning network and the tap root will end the scalability and privacy issues of the world’s most popular digital currency
Bitcoin is moving towards nano payments and this is going to push the technology to a larger population, says Andreas Antonopoulos, who also pins hopes on technological innovations like the lightning network and the tap root to end the scaling headaches and privacy issues of the world’s most popular cryptocurrency.
“The opening up of the dimension of space, where until now the minimum transaction you could do viably on Bitcoin was about $1 to $10, we’re going way below that to sub cents transactions, true micro payments and even nano payments below, that open up a whole range of applications,” the crypto evangelist said in a podcast interview with Bitcoin magazine’s editor Christie Harkin.
“What’s interesting is that now we’re talking about applications that are unprecedented that simply do not have an equivalent in the traditional financial and payment industry and once we start exploring those, that’s when this technology really comes into fruition,” he added.
Speaking about scalability and privacy—the two biggest problems for Bitcoin that exist even 12 years after the crypto’s original protocol was designed by Satoshi Nakamoto—Andreas said he believes that the lightning network and tap root could solve the two issues, respectively, and enable it to compete with the currently existing payment systems.
While the lightning network allows crypto users to do numerous transactions outside of the main blockchain and then record them as a single one, tap root is a technology that allows participants in a blockchain to cooperate and sign off on a settlement transaction together.
“The lightning network, until now has been primarily a fairly raw and kludgy protocol implementation, a prototype that is gradually getting polished, but the rough edges have mostly been polished off.
“We’re talking about transactions that take less than a seconds to be fully cleared irreversible and trusted and where you can do thousands of transactions per second potentially”
“And we’re getting to a point where the user interfaces in the lining wallets, the infrastructure, the reliability of the system, the consistency of the experiences that are beginning to shine through all of the efforts that have gone into the last two years of running production networks,” the crypto educator said.
According to Andreas, the snore signatures tap root that could put an end to the long-standing privacy issues of Bitcoin one and for all.
“The underlying scripting language that is almost ready to deploy and I hope they’ll be deployed faster… and those are snore signatures, tap roots and tap scripts that come as a package of changes… they create new building blocks on top of which a lot of exciting things can be built.
“There are a couple of other potential changes to this writing language that are being proposed that massively increase the flexibility of the scripting language without making it turing-complete,” he added.
Andreas stressed that both the technologies would monumentally impact “how Bitcoin is used, how it’s perceived and really transform the environments”.
“Until now, a lot of what we were doing with Bitcoin, at least on the surface, was stuff that you could also do with traditional financial services, lining opens up a whole new dimension of time and space in terms of time we’re talking about transactions that take less than a seconds to be fully cleared irreversible and trusted and where you can do thousands of transactions per second potentially,” he said.
