New Lightning Network Code Release Trolls Community With “Block Size Increase” Update

If you do follow crypto news, you have probably heard about two things: block size fights and the Lightning Network. The LN is a Bitcoin off chain scalability, which makes transactions happen outside of the main Bitcoin network in order to make them faster.

Block size increases, on the other hand, are seen in a way less positive light than this. Some networks like Bitcoin and the original Bitcoin Cash have forked because of it and BCH was forked again into BCH and BSV because of all the troubled caused when people wanted to upgrade the value again.

Now, these two aspects were merged together as the LND team, which is the most active implementation of the Lightning Network, has released a new minor update, the version 0.5.2, this week.

The update was generally considered to be very standard and straightforward. It included several kinds of changes that were included by many contributors. While most of the upgrades were focused on making the network easier for new end-users, one feature stood out: “block size increase”.

As we have said, block size increases can be quite controversial and start conflicts on some ecosystems, which is why so many tokens go to war against some parts of their communities. However, it seems that there is nothing to worry about, as there is not really a block size increase, it was only one developer that decided to troll the community by naming the update like this.

According to Olaoluwa Osuntokun, from the Lightning Labs, the command line tool is only used to get a snapshot of the network, nothing more. He just wanted to be funny with the title and cause some controversy because of the history that block size increases have with the core Bitcoin community, which is against them.

In fact, this week someone uploaded pornographic images of children on the Bitcoin SV network, which basically is a good reason against having such a big block size.

Osuntokun explained that each node stores a graph of its view of the other Lightning Nodes, so it can always determine the best route to let the payment go. However, as more people are using the network, they need more size for the graphs. This is what the block size is all about. Not how much you can send in a transaction or mine it but the size of the graph.

Now, the limit will be updated from 4 MB to 50 MB, around 12.5 times higher. This will let the developers use larger snapshots and will give them some breathing room.

It is important to know that increasing the real size of transactions on the Lightning Network might not be a really good idea. It uses the same size of the original Bitcoin network, which has its reasons to decide that it will continue to be this way.

Also, the LN is very experimental and there is a chance that you may lose your money if the transaction does not go smoothly, which means that people have a lot of reasons to be afraid of bigger block sizes and big transactions. The smaller they are, the less the risk.

Despite the changes, the 0.5.2 is still a “miner release”, which will not affect the end-user directly, only make transactions more smooth. A major release would be very different and bring actual new features for the people who are interested in using the LN.

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