Lightning to energize Bitcoin in 2018?

During the last half of 2017 the transaction costs for Bitcoin began to climb steeply, and often the smallest transactions attracted a twenty dollar fee or even higher. Try to visualize a five dollar cup of coffee that needed a processing fee four to five time higher ADDED to the price. Mix this with the sometimes sudden price swings in either an upward or downward direction, and you have a recipe that might scare new adopters be they investors or those who believe in Bitcoin as a legitimate coin or currency. While countries like Japan seem to be leading the charge to make cryptocurrency spendable at any retail store or online, the fees combined with slow processing speed seem to have slowed this process in a world-wide way. We believe it is encouraging and even essential to listen to people like Elizabeth Stark and Andreas Antonopoulos speak about lightning networks and also onion routing. Elizabeth is CEO and co-founder of Lightning Labs, and Andreas a Bitcoin educator who is arguably the most knowledgeable person on the planet when it comes to this subject. Two experts