By Roni Rose
Bitcoin was intended to be a digital currency that enabled high-speed transactions and made micro-payments easy as pie. Unfortunately, it hasn’t scaled so well since its inception, and many are skeptical that it will ever fulfill this mission.
While some have accepted that bitcoin will resort to serving as a store of value, and believe other currencies with new blockchains are the answer to this need, one woman is determined to bring ease of transaction to the bitcoin network.
Elizabeth Stark, co-founder and CEO of Lighting Labs, is building a second layer to the bitcoin blockchain that will let people transact back and forth, and delay the final logging on the blockchain.
Essentially, if you’re sending 2,000 satoshis to someone every minute, and they’re sending you an amount between 500 and 1,500 satoshis every other minute, rather than logging those individual transactions on the blockchain each time, they’ll be logged on the Lightning Network, and the final amount that ends up with each person will be officially settled on the blockchain once the channel between the two parties is closed. That’s a simple case, but on a larger scale, transactions can pass through multiple payment channels on the Lightning Network before each party’s balance is settled on the bitcoin blockchain.
Stark’s creation will relieve the bitcoin blockchain of the congestion that’s currently slowing down all of our bitcoin transactions.
In addition to building Lighting, Stark has been a leader in the tech world for several years. She spent several years working on preserving a free and open internet, and engaged 18 million people in the fight against SOPA. Elizabeth lends her brilliant mind to young entrepreneurs as a mentor in the Thiel Fellowship program; works as an adviser to Comma.ai, a startup building autonomous driving tech, and multiple other startups; has taught students at Yale and Stanford on matters related to a free and open internet; works with new startups as an entrepreneur-in-residence at the Stanford StartX accelerator; and holds a J.D. from Harvard.
Oh, and she’s lived in Berlin, Singapore, Paris, and Rio de Janeiro and speaks French, German, and Portuguese.
If you think it seems like Elizabeth Stark has lived multiple lives, you’re not alone. Along with building multiple movements, she shares her thoughts and knowledge regularly on Twitter. I also highly recommend checking out her explanation of the Lightning Network, here.
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