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Thunder Network Gives Bitcoin Visa Scale.

Bitcoin has scaling issues. Currently the Network can support around 7 transactions per second. The Thunder Network seeks to fix this.

This has caused a lot of debate. Many would like to see Bitcoin scale globally. To achieve this, it would need to process many more transactions. There are a variety of proposed solutions.

One fix involves increasing the size of ‘blocks’. The Bitcoin Network bundles individual transactions into blocks. Each block currently has an upper size limit of 1 MB, processed every 10 minutes, on average.

Increasing the block size is an obvious solution. But not all agree on its merit.

Gavin is right. The time to increase the block size limit is before transaction processing shows congestion problems. Discuss now, do soon

— AndreasMAntonopoulos (@aantonop) 5 May 2015

Another solution involves ‘Lightning Networks’. These are decentralised payment networks that allow near instant payments. Transactions occur independent of Bitcoin. These networks settle to the main Bitcoin network only periodically.

This solution has been highly theoretical, until now. Blockchain, a leading provider of Bitcoin wallet solutions, has released code for its ‘Thunder Network’. This is an implementation of the ‘Lightning Network’ concept.

Thunder Network Speed

The Thunder network can process 100,000 transactions per second. This is about twice as many as Visa.

Further, transactions are cheaper. Settlement from thunder to the Bitcoin blockchain involves a Bitcoin network fee. But lots of thunder network transactions can be made, before settling. So, even microtransactions will be possible.

At the moment the Bitcoin network cannot support Thunder. Bitcoin is missing two critical pieces of technical infrastructure. In future it is expected that these will be deployed. At that time Thunder should be ready for large-scale deployment.

The company has released its Alpha version of the software. It is a proof of concept, with both a node and a GUI wallet.

The code is open source, ready for community review and contribution. Blockchain is looking for early feedback. They are looking to improve the software.

Thunder is an exciting project to watch. At the right time we at iceCUBED are excited to finally see Bitcoin start to compete with large-scale, centralised, payment channels.

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