Bitcoin Scaling

Bitcoin's base layer deliberately limits block space, a design choice covered in Block Size and defended in The Block Size Debate. This section covers the two broad families of response: getting more out of existing block space, and moving transaction volume off the base layer entirely, through a spectrum of systems with genuinely different trust models worth distinguishing carefully.

What you need to know first

The Block Size Debate, Multisig, and Taproot, the systems in this section build directly on all three.

Chapters

Getting more from the base layer

1. Block Size: the throughput ceiling, and why it's a deliberate tradeoff, not an oversight
2. SegWit as a Scaling Upgrade: how much capacity it actually added, isolated from its malleability fix
3. Transaction Batching: quantified fee savings from combining payments

Moving off the base layer

1. Payment Channels: the general two-party mechanism the Lightning Network builds on

Other Bitcoin layers and systems

Presented in order of decreasing trust-minimization, pay attention to what secures the peg or the transfer in each case, not just what each system's own internal mechanism does.

1. Sidechains: the general pattern, and why the peg mechanism is what actually matters
2. Liquid Network: a federated sidechain built for institutional settlement speed and privacy
3. Federations: the trust model generalized, and where else it recurs
4. Statechains: off-chain UTXO ownership transfer, and the semi-trusted deletion it depends on
5. RGB: client-side validation, contrasted directly with how Ethereum smart contracts work
6. Bitcoin Rollup Proposals: BitVM, and why genuine rollups are harder to build on Bitcoin than Ethereum

Next

Continue to Lightning Network for the full, multi-hop network built on the payment channel mechanism introduced in this section.