Andreas Antonopoulos Touches On Bitcoin Scalability Issues and ‘Premature Optimization’

Andreas Antonopoulos, a recognized expert in the crypto space and author of Mastering Bitcoin, said that Bitcoin (BTC) scalability issues may not be able to be entirely solved. During a Q/A session on YouTube, he said that the scalability problem will always exist in the network.

Scalability Issues Will Always Be Present

For a very long time, Bitcoin has been facing different scaling issues. That includes the fact that when it reached its all-time high, there were so many transactions processed, users could have to wait even hours to be able to perform a transaction. Additionally, trading fees increased to values that were not competitive for users to transact Bitcoin.

There have been implemented different solutions for this issue. The first of these solutions is known as Segregated Witness (SegWit) that allows transactions to be smaller in size. In this way, it is possible for blocks (which have 1 MB of space) to process a larger number of transactions.

At the same time, Bitcoin developers are working on the Lightning Network (LN), which will be allowing Bitcoin to process a larger number of transactions in less than a second and for almost no fee. Although the Lightning Network has been expanding, Antonopoulos believes that there is no such a thing as “final solution” for the scalability issues on the Bitcoin blockchain.

As he mentioned, Segregated Witness is not enough for future mass adoption. Indeed, this solution was created in order to become a momentous solution for scalability issues. At least, until the Lightning Network is complete and running.

Antonopoulos has also commented that trying to solve the scaling issues at each level, would be something difficult to do, which will be bringing another set of scaling issues. This would happen because a whole new avenue for applications would be opened up.

As he mentioned, Segregated Witness was just the first step of many other optimizations that could come in the future. Schnorr Signatures could be the next optimization to be implemented on top of Bitcoin and that would allow it to keep scaling. With this implementation, it might be possible to see an improvement in terms of capacity between 25% to 35%.