A study carried out by the cryptocurrency research company Diar suggests that the Bitcoin Lightning Network, a second layer solution considered as the answer to the cryptocurrency scalability problem, is not yet capable of making high payments.

According to the report, the network only guarantees a 100 percent success rate when payments are equal to US $ 0.03 or less than that amount. As the amount increases, the possibility that the payment is made correctly decreases; if you wanted to make a transaction for US $ 5.52, the operation would be successful only 51% of the time. Payments of US $ 306 or more have a success rate of just 1%.

Diar's research adds that the number of channels on the network has been growing steadily, but that its efficiency has not. As the CCN portal would have reported, Lightning Network showed 1,000 major payment channels in February, and now has more than 5,050.

According to The Next Web, Diar's data comes from the Reddit user YeOldDoc, who used the data available from Lnmainnet.gaben.win to obtain the results. According to the website's data, Lightning Network currently has 2,326 nodes and a total capacity of US $ 142,000.

Lightning Network is a second layer solution that allows bitcoiners to send micropayments to each other almost instantly, while paying insignificant fees. The network works by creating so-called payment channels between nodes.

These channels see two nodes "in agreement" to maintain a specific amount of bitcoins in the channel, which both parties can use to carry out the transaction they want using the funds it contains. The transactions recorded in the chain of blocks are those that open and close the channel.

The network is composed of interconnected channels and nodes, which can make transactions between them, without a direct connection, even as the network finds alternate routes potentially available. However, for a transaction to be feasible, all channels must have sufficient funds to support it.

In addition, each node must be online when the payment is made, which further reduces the chances of transactions being made. So far, the second layer solution of the leading cryptocurrency has only been used in minor applications.

The developers have created several tests that show its usefulness. These include Poketoshi , which allows users to play Pokémon by paying only 10 satoshis per move, and Satoshis.place , which allows users to scribble on a page after paying for space.

Lightning Network is a technology that is still in its infancy. Lightning Labs co-founder and technology director (CTO) Olaoluwa Osuntokun responded to Diar's research, arguing that the "model itself is flawed and produces unreliable metrics."

He noted that the firm's report failed to consider that some channels do not admit transactions greater than their specified amount, saying metaphorically that "the probability that a room that admits 10 people allows 50 people to fit is 0".

"By not eliminating channels that have a total capacity that is less than the target quantity that will be sent, the results of the model are very skewed, since they include pointless data points," said Osuntokun.