Why Bitcoin is the Best Monetary Network with Lyn Alden - WBD549

Lyn Alden is a macroeconomist and investment strategist. In this
interview, we discuss her latest paper on the Lightning Network
(LN). We focus on the importance of Bitcoin’s base layer, how LN
compares to Visa and Mastercard, and how LN is connecting the
world in new and revolutionary ways.


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To understand the Lightning Network, you need to go back and
understand money: what attributes does it need to have, and what
are the best means of facilitating these attributes?


Bitcoiners believe it to be the latest evolution in money. It has
the best combination of features of any previous version of
money: it is hard, auditable, portable, uncensorable, immutable,
fungible, trustless and decentralised. Yet, Bitcoin’s Achilles’
heel, and the question that plagued its first decade, was how it
could scale to become an effective medium of exchange.


The capacity of the Bitcoin network is purposefully limited to
ensure that the network can remain as decentralised as possible.
For Bitcoin to operate as a medium of exchange, a transactional
layer needed to be built on top of the network.


This is the Lightning Network. It's designed to provide an
instant and cheap payment system connecting the world.