Skip to content

Scaling Bitcoin: The Rise of the Lightning Network

TalkLisa Neigut
researcherpractitioner
Scaling Bitcoin: The Rise of the Lightning Network
Open resource →

Lisa Neigut (Nifty), a core lightning developer, traces the Lightning Network's history from the 2015 Poon-Dryja whitepaper through the pivotal Scaling Bitcoin conferences and the contentious SegWit soft fork that was a technical prerequisite for mainnet deployment. She details the BOLT specification process—contrasting it with Bitcoin's informal BIP system—and recounts her own multi-year saga drafting, implementing, and finally merging the 'dual funding' (interactive transaction construction) proposal in 2024.

Topics

bolt-specification-processdual-funding-interactive-transaction-constructiongovernanceguest-talkslightning-network-payment-channelsprotocolsresearchscaling-bitcoin-conference-seriessegwit-and-transaction-malleability

Related resources

Talk

Guest Talk with Daniel Bashir | A Survey of AI for the Protocol-Minded

Daniel Bashir, ML engineer at AWS and host of The Gradient podcast, surveys how protocol thinking applies across AI—from funding and scaling laws (like DeepMind's Chinchilla compute-optimal training protocol) to benchmarks (perplexity vs. François Chollet's ARC benchmark for measuring sample-efficient generalization) to regulation (the EU AI Act's risk-tiered categorization). He argues that nearly every layer of AI development—research, engineering, deployment, and governance—can be reframed as a set of competing or evolving protocols, using examples like Sarah Hooker's 'hardware lottery' and Tolga Bolukbasi-style debates over fair/responsible AI operationalization.

Daniel Bashir

Talk

Guest Talk with Trent Van Epps | Capital and Enclosure in Software Commons: Linux & Ethereum

Trent Van Epps, researcher at the Ethereum Foundation and steward of Protocol Guild, presents a framework distinguishing capital and commons modes of production, then applies it to case studies of Linux (and Red Hat's gradual enclosure of CentOS) and Ethereum. He argues Ethereum is unique among software commons because it contains embedded capital circuits (proof-of-stake ETH, MEV, liquid staking) and produces a single globally-bound state object, raising the question of whether this containment stabilizes or dooms the commons to capture, and proposes Protocol Guild's unaffiliated funding model as a partial countermeasure.

Trent Van Epps

Talk

Guest Talk with Nils Gilman & Jonathan Blake | Planetary Subsidiarity

Nils Gilman and Jonathan Blake of the Berggruen Institute present their book 'Children of a Modest Star,' arguing that planetary-scale problems like climate change and pandemics—phenomena that flow across borders independent of human intention—cannot be governed by the existing nation-state system or UN multilateralism. They propose a multiscalar governance architecture based on the principle of subsidiarity, where issues like climate mitigation are handled by new planetary institutions, adaptation is handled locally through translocal networks (e.g., Los Angeles collaborating with Cape Town rather than Miami), and the nation-state becomes a mediating 'meso-level' rather than the sovereign center, aiming for 'habitability' rather than mere 'sustainability.

Nils Gilman, Jonathan Blake