For many people coming into cryptocurrencies in the last few months, it was probably bitcoin's huge growth in 2017 what attracted them in the first place.
However in the last month and a half, we've seen a big pullback (I know, bitcoin has seen bigger and longer price "crashes") fed by rumours of new regulation in South Korea and a posible banning of mining activities in China. But above that, I think that the biggest reason behind this sluggish streak has to do with delayed transactions and growing fees.
This has given fuel to critics of bitcoin about it's scalability limitations and some people are even putting some doubts over the fact that bitcoin is no longer the cryptocurrency envisioned by Satoshi Nakamoto in his original whitepaper.
After all of this, you might think that bitcoin has already peaked and that sooner or later it will concede it's dominance to some other cryptocurrency. But actually, some groups of developers had been working for the last couple of years in a solution.
That solution is called Lightning Network. A network of off-chain payment channels in which it would be posible to make instant transaction with lower fees.
But of course this intended solution has found it's own group of critics, citing that in some cases it would be pretty difficult if not imposible for some transactions to find a route to be completed inside the network or that to trying to solve this isue could lead to centralisation of the whole system.
I'm personally confindent that LN will be an effective solution to solve the biggest issues of scaling bitcoin as a payment form and that once it is fully implemented, it will propel it's use and it's price accordingly.
Please share your thoughts