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BitcoinLite is a sidechain of Bitcoin designed for smaller devices and designed
for use with Lightning Network.
The blocksize of BitcoinLite is 64kb instead of 1024kb.
The block generation time of BitcoinLite is every 60 minutes instead of 10 minutes.
All other properties of BitcoinLite is an exact replica of Bitcoin itself.
This essentially makes the blockchain storage requirements 96X less than the main Bitcoin one.
The Bitcoin blockchain from ~2009-2020 has grown to almost 300 GB.
The same period of time on BitcoinLite would be only 3.1 GB. That is a reasonable size for
a mobile device today. And since we're starting at 0 in 2020, then we're looking at something
closer to 3 GB in 2030.
Of course, 64kb every 1 hour doesn't allow for very many transactions, nor for speedy transactions.
However, the concept here is that BitcoinLite depends heavily on Lightning Network for scale.
Channel creation may be slow, and perhaps even "expensive" (which theoretically will be miniscule
if channel creation is rare enough), but channel creation should be a rare event. Perhaps someone
might set up a channel once every 6 months or so.
BLite+LN won't replace Bitcoin, in fact, needs Bitcoin to function. It will however, allow very
small devices to be fully-validating nodes.
There will also be nodes that require a full Bitcoin node alongside a full BitcoinLite node to
perform the federation needed between the two chains. These would not need to be mobile devices,
and can be operating on traditional servers.
Of course, Lightning Network will still function on Bitcoin's main chain. But, if BitcoinLite
catches on, it may be ideal to standardize Bitcoin Lightning payments to be BitcoinLite Lightning
payments - only for the reason to avoid too many choices and adding confusion for users. This
transition, as complex as it might be, would be better done sooner than later, because as time
goes on, it will be harder to change course. Nevertheless, two modes of operation can co-exist
even if it is confusing.
Mining will need to happen on BitcoinLite as well, but it shouldn't be too hard to gain some
traction and grow organically.
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