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The 'lightning network' has been one of the promised solutions 'coming soon' for many years now. Except, no-one has solved all its problems yet. There remain difficult issues to do with routing of transactions, and some horrible money-losing behaviour if users don't stay online to protect their channels from being looted. On top of that, there's not enough space on the blockchain to allow everyone to open & close a payment channel anyway.

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If Bitcoin took (likely more than) ten years to get to the state where we are now, it's likely that second layer solutions such as Lightning are not developed overnight.

They've been in development for a couple years now.

There are already working implementations of lightning on litecoin which can route transactions.

lighting is designed to be able to farm out channel enforcement to other nodes on the network to prevent cheating while preserving privacy.

lighting does require more block space to operate globally than is available. It still scales better than bitcoin though.

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