At press time, the Bitcoin network is currently facing a backlog of over 135,000 unconfirmed transactions and fees have soared. This comes days after the proponents of the SegWit2x scaling solution announced they wouldn’t move forward with a doubling of Bitcoin’s block size due to lack of consensus.
Since larger blocks are clearly dead in the water, there is only one apparent solution to the scalability problem: lightning network.In addition to all the private payment channels they are a part of, each peer would have one channel open to the Bitcoin Blockchain.