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Thunderbolt protocol: Reshaping Bitcoin scalability and challenging the Lightning Network dilemma
Bitcoin Scalability New Solution Thunderbolt: Reshaping Lighting Network Design Logic
1. Bitcoin Payment Dilemma
Although Bitcoin has characteristics such as "decentralization" and "immutability", it faces many challenges in everyday payment scenarios. Issues such as long transaction confirmation times and high transaction fees make it impractical to use Bitcoin for small purchases like coffee. The conservative script structure of the Bitcoin network also limits most off-chain interaction scenarios, failing to meet people's demand for fast small payments.
2. Lighting Network: Advantages and Limitations
The Lighting Network, as a scaling solution for Bitcoin, achieves high-frequency bookkeeping by establishing exclusive "payment channels" between users, only synchronizing the final state to the blockchain when the channel is closed. This model is similar to a regular settlement method between friends, rather than transferring funds immediately after each transaction.
However, the Lighting Network has exposed multiple dilemmas in practical applications:
These structural defects make it difficult for the Lighting Network to break through application bottlenecks. Currently, the total amount of funds locked in the network is only about 100 million USD, which is negligible compared to Bitcoin's trillion-dollar market value.
Three, Introduction to the Thunderbolt Protocol
Thunderbolt is a soft fork upgrade solution based on the Bitcoin base layer, making changes directly at the protocol level of the Bitcoin main chain to enhance scalability, transaction performance, and programmability.
Main features include:
Unlike traditional scaling approaches, Thunderbolt adopts the "native on-chain scaling" path, where all functions run directly on the Bitcoin main chain, using native BTC instead of cross-chain tokens.
3.1 Core Mechanism Analysis
The core mechanism of Thunderbolt includes:
These designs ensure the security and decentralization of transactions.
3.2 Protocol Design and Key Innovations
The main innovations of Thunderbolt are:
4. Comparison with Existing Lighting Network Solutions
Compared to existing solutions like the BOLT protocol and Breez SDK, Thunderbolt has advantages in security and theoretical completeness. It can prove the security of protocol design and ensure that malicious users cannot profit unilaterally.
However, Thunderbolt also faces some challenges:
5. The Potential Impact and Development Path of Thunderbolt
Although Thunderbolt is theoretically close to the optimal solution of BTCFi, its actual application is still in the early stages. Possible development paths include:
The greatest significance of the Thunderbolt is to grant Bitcoin assets "off-chain contract composability." The introduction of the two major features of UTXO Bundling and OP_CAT has brought native programmability and higher on-chain throughput to the Bitcoin network. This provides the possibility for unifying various protocols and assets in the Bitcoin ecosystem, but there is still a certain distance to widespread application by developers.