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Comment by shilch | Hacker News Reader

TCP wasn't build on IP because it wasn't scalable. It was build on it because it was. But that aside, calling Lightning on BTC a second-layer is a bit misleading: Lightning data is not encapsulated in BTC data, more like the other way around; so Lightning is more like layer 0 and BTC layer 1 in that model. (That's also not entirely correct either but much closer)

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> At the start, TCP handled both datagram transmission and routing, but as the protocol expanded, other researchers started to recommend that these two functions be split into layers.

> One of these researchers, Jonathan Postel of the University of California’s Information Sciences Institute and an editor for the Request of[sic] Comments (RFCs) which is a document series capturing the development of the Internet.

> Postel has stated:

> “We are screwing up in our design of Internet protocols by violating the principle of layering”

> Basically, the monolithic design of TCP would soon become inflexible and unable to scale efficiently. Therefore TCP was split into two protocols, TCP & the Internet Protocol (IP).

https://www.colocationamerica.com/blog/history-of-ip-address...

I'm not all too familiar with the history of IP and TCP but my point still stands. Protocols aren't build because the underlying protocol doesn't scale in term of throughput, it's for the opposite reason that they scale very well. I could also have used HTTP and TCP.

Bitcoin has very strong properties for _security_ which is the inherent property that makes it possible to build other automated trustless systems on top of it.

The comparison with TCP and IP is limit in that TCP data all goes inside IP packets. With second layer transaction systems the relationship is different: the security and stability comes from the underlying blockchain. The higher part adds capacity.

Bitcoin forms a trustworthy robotic court system upon which the wheels of automated commerce can ride.

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