There is major, infuriating controversy in this story and is in large part what shaped Bitcoin to remain what it is today - a grassroots, bottom-up movement where the average people (plebs), in aggregate with one another, dictate the rules of the network. As you can see, a massive part of the world’s average speed would exclude them from the ability to run a node under these conditions. Note that average speed implies that many are even lower than said threshold. In many threshold cases, it’s known in advance which participants are most likely to sign. Users begin to outbid each other via the adjustable transaction fee in order to have their transaction be included by the miners, who are incentivized to choose the highest-paying transactions. Bitcoin, the base layer, is a globally-replicated public ledger - every transaction is broadcast to every participant in the network. Critically, one need not be directly connected to another party in order to pay them - channels can be used by other nodes in the network in order to increase their reachability. Channels can and in my opinion ideally should stay open for a long time (e.g., a year or more).
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Further, spinning up a new node would require one to download all of these petabytes of data and verify each signature - both of which would make it so that a new node would take a long time (years) to spin up. The market is much more stable than it was 4-5 years ago, and it is much closer to its long-term goal of $1,000 than the $2,500 level. Even Ayn Rand, perhaps the most famous proponent of gold as the one true currency, praised it not because it is shiny and electrically conductive, but rather because it has been used as a medium of economic trade for the past six thousand years. It is evident that one cannot practically scale such a ledger to accommodate the entire world’s growing transaction rate. In Bitcoin, each node has to store and validate each transaction. In stark contrast, the evidently-unsuccessful fork Bitcoin Cash sacrificed all hopes of decentralization by increasing its block size to 32 megabytes, 32 times more than Bitcoin, for a mere maximum of 50 payments per second on the base chain.<
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This allows one to batch billions of payments into two on-chain transactions - one for opening the channel and one for closing it. In this piece, we are going to show how the Lightning Network addresses Bitcoin’s scalability problems and undoubtedly proves that the small-block decision was ultimately the right one. And to make matters worse, 24,000 transactions per second doesn’t make for a truly unique global payments network in and of itself. To answer how many payments the network can do in a second, we need to understand how many an average channel supports. A Lightning node: separate software that communicates with each other and constitutes a new peer-to-peer network. The viral effect might be amplified as software and hardware providers start to integrate Bitcoin into every day work flows and products. Generally, we distinguish between two main types of Bitcoin wallets: software wallets and hardware wallets. Unless you own a BitCoin Mining hardware such as Antminer, you will probably not see a single coin mined with your 'powerful' desktop computer, this is because it takes a lot of processing power just to solve a simple equation. The high proportion of wind energy on the ERCOT grid, where almost 1/4 of the Bitcoin mining network are now located, https://youtu.be/ is another factor for the strong showing from wind (see ERCOT 2023 Generating Capacity below)
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In essence, Bitcoin is a decentralized peer to peer payments network and a virtual currency that essentially operates as online cash. With 16,266 nodes in the network (as of November 2022), assuming each payment has to go through three channels (four nodes), the network should be able to achieve around 134,194 payments per second. Statistics show that the average payment goes through around three channels. We will compare that to the theoretical capacity of Lightning, because conversely, getting the average rate of payments in Lightning is impossible due to its private nature, and is also not revealing of capability because the demand for Lightning payments is still relatively low. Visa isn’t the only payments network in the world, and the world is growing more interconnected every day. To put it into numbers, if Bitcoin is to ever scale to Visa’s purported peak capacity levels (24,000 transactions per second) a node would need 48 megabits per second (Mbps) second just to receive the transactions over the network.