Altcoin News: The New Release of the Lightning Network Daemon Has Increased the “Block Size” of the Routing Graph

February 9th, 2019 by Marko Vidrih on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE

The latest version of the code of the most popular Lightning Network client includes an “increase block size”. But this is not at all the size about which the spears were broken two years ago.

One of the most active Lightning teams, LND, released the latest minor release on Wednesday — beta version 0.5.2. Although it includes several changes, mainly aimed at making the experimental payment system more convenient for end users, the new release will surely attract Bitcoin veterans by “increasing the block size”. This innovation may seem like a direct reference to the debates that split the community in 2016–2017.

However, the new function relates only to the internal mechanics of the Lightning Network and is not associated with the blockchain.

“It’s for the command line tool to be able to get a snapshot of the network. Thought I’d troll with the title lol,“ Lightning Labs developer Olaoluwa Osuntokun told CoinDesk.

Each node in the network stores a “graph” of its own visualization of other Lightning nodes in the network. That way, when a user sends a payment to someone else, the site can determine the best route that funds can reach their destination. However, the graph grows as more people test the Lightning Network, so developers want to change these restrictions. Thus, the team increased the “block size” of the graph from 4 MB to 50 MB, so that developers could get a larger snapshot.

Even with such releases, the Lightning Network is still experimental and is considered risky to use, as users may lose money if the software does not work as planned.

However, the release also lays the foundation for the much-anticipated changes to the Lightning Network, such as Atomic Multi-Channel Payments (AMP), which will allow users to send payment fragments through several channels.

Recently it became known that the bandwidth capacity of the Lightning Network in the Bitcoin blockchain increased by 15% over the month.

Author: Marko Vidrih