This is an opinion editorial by Stanislav Kozlovski, a software engineer and macroeconomic researcher.

Many Bitcoiners have heard of Bitcoin’s “lack of scalability” — it is one of the most common critiques waged against the project by both gluttonous cryptocurrency competitors and incumbent establishment actors.

Some oldtimers may remember the heated, bathed-in-controversy Blocksize Wars of 2015 to 2017 which, aided by industry insiders, most shallowly aimed to make Bitcoin scale to more transactions by increasing the maximum block size and by doing so, almost set precedent and changed Bitcoin’s future course forever.

Both of these issues will ultimately prove to be left on the wrong side of history. 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.

Base Layer Limitations And Choices

Before we understand what the Lightning Network is solving, we should first understand what the inherent problem is. Simply put: You cannot scale a blockchain to validate the entire world’s transactions in a decentralized way.

Blockchains suffer from an inherent limitation which forces them to trade off between three qualities — one quality of their system has to go for the other two. As pictured above, a blockchain can only reliably have two of these three qualities:

• Decentralized: not controlled by any single party or a small number…