The brief reply is we’re not fairly there but however nearly…the issues we have to accomplish this objective nevertheless are on the roadmap. I say this to handle the frequent FUD which states that Bitcoin can by no means scale to world adoption because of its 1MB block measurement and gradual transaction price. That is false. Not solely have scaling options been considered however they’re on the energetic roadmap of lightning and bitcoin builders going ahead. So if you happen to suppose Bitcoin is a few lifeless and historical protocol with no clue as to methods to transfer into the longer term…suppose once more.
So what is required? First, a future and never controversial improve to Bitcoin through tender fork implementing some type of SIGHASH_ANYPREVOUT. (hopefully in Segwit v2) As well as, the implementation of eltoo and eventually, channel factories. (search for data on eltoo and factories if you’re not already acquainted) Assuming micropayment channel networks like Channel Factories come to life on Bitcoin, onboarding the planet can be a reasonably arbitrary factor to do.
Channel factories would enable us to onboard 20 individuals directly onto the lightning community. From there, 100 lightning channels might be created. Assuming that the driving narrative is that 6 billion individuals need to use the Lightning community ASAP, then this may be simply achieved utilizing channel factories and direct cooperation with the KYC exchanges. (That is assuming the world didn’t thoughts utilizing exchanges to onboard themselves and that utilizing peer-to-peer atomic swaps wasn’t of essential significance)
Coinbase, for instance, may conceivably ask for a public-key from a consumer’s custodial pockets after withdrawing funds from an individual’s account. They’d group at the very least 20 individuals collectively and use their public keys to derive the 20 of 20 tapscript handle. They’d ship out the relevant info to all events concerned after which ship the sum of all 20 peoples funds to the taproot handle successfully onboarding 20 individuals onto the Lightning Community and thus Bitcoin community with 1 transaction. By my calculations, the alternate may create a large transaction that fills a whole block with 1 P2TR to 23,230 P2TR outputs.
The arbitrary payment Coinbase would cost every particular person and thus put in direction of the large transaction would greater than incentivize any miner to mine the large transaction into their block for the reason that payment can be bigger than every other mixture of different transactions within the mempool. Given that every output is successfully representing 20 new individuals being onboarded to the community, this might imply 20*23,230 = 464,600 individuals may very well be onboarded per block. (That comes out to 774 tx/sec) This is able to imply that you might onboard 6 billion individuals in 90 days. Even if you happen to had been simply allocating 25% of every block for transactions like this and leaving the opposite 75% for normal transactions, that will nonetheless imply you may onboard your entire planet in 1 yr which appears greater than cheap to me.
Granted, I understand I’m neglecting the time it will take to offboard all these individuals however I’m coping with simply the idealized best-case state of affairs right here. (Particularly since FUD is all the time centered round excellent worst case eventualities) As well as, your entire level of cost channels is to maintain them open and never shut them arbitrarily and repeatedly. Channel Factories enable individuals to open a number of channels directly and to re-balance their channels with none on chain transactions. And whereas this compressed onboarding permits for such pace by my calculations the more serious case state of affairs to dump 6 billion individuals from the channel factories to on chain P2PK addresses can be 4 years. 1TR to twenty PWSPKH is 2,752WU. 3,996,000 WU / 2,752 = 1,453. So 1,453 trans can slot in a block. 23,230/1,453 = 16 so it takes 16 blocks to dump one unique block. 90 days * 16 = 4 yrs (BitcoinCore Max WU per block: 3996000)