The Design Logic of Bitcoin Lighting Network and the Innovation of Thunderbolt Network

1. Limitations of Bitcoin Payments

Although Bitcoin has characteristics such as decentralization and immutability, it faces many challenges in everyday payment scenarios. When using Bitcoin to purchase small items like coffee, issues such as long transaction confirmation times and high fees are very prominent. The conservative script structure of the Bitcoin network also limits the implementation of most off-chain interaction scenarios. However, users still have a strong demand for fast and low-cost small payments, which drives the industry to continuously explore solutions for Bitcoin scalability.

2. Lighting Network: Advantages and Challenges Coexist

The Lighting Network, as the second layer scaling solution for Bitcoin, achieves high-frequency accounting by establishing exclusive "payment channels" between users, ultimately synchronizing the fund status only when the channel is closed to the blockchain. This model is similar to friends accumulating multiple expenses and settling the account in one go.

However, the Lighting Network has also exposed multiple dilemmas in practical applications:

• The threshold for building channels is high, requiring prior locking of funds.
• Complex routing issues lead to a high failure rate of transactions
• Users need to remain online to prevent fraud, as the security risks are high.

These structural problems have made it difficult for the actual application of the Lighting Network to break through the bottleneck. Currently, the total amount of funds locked in the Lighting Network is only about 100 million USD, which is negligible compared to the trillion-level market value of the Bitcoin system. This has prompted the industry to consider whether it is possible to build a more complete off-chain payment protocol.

3. Innovation of the Thunderbolt Protocol

Thunderbolt is a soft fork upgrade solution based on the Bitcoin base layer, directly modifying the protocol level of the Bitcoin main chain, fundamentally enhancing Bitcoin's scalability, transaction performance, and programmability.

Its core innovations include:

1. UTXO Bundling technology combines multiple UTXOs for processing, increasing transaction speed by approximately 10 times.

2. Reintroduce and expand the OP_CAT opcode to enhance smart contract capabilities.

3. Goldinals unified asset standard provides an asset issuance framework based on zero-knowledge proofs.

4. BitMM on-chain automated market maker system, integrating BRC-20, Runes, and Ordinals protocol assets.

5. BitVisa decentralized identity and credential system.

Thunderbolt adopts the "native layer-1 scaling" approach, with all functions running directly on the Bitcoin main chain, using native BTC instead of cross-chain mapped tokens.

3.1 Core Mechanism Analysis

The core mechanism of Thunderbolt includes:

• Flexible and adjustable multi-signature
• Asynchronous Fault-Tolerant Committee Ledger
• Atomic Swap Finalization

These mechanisms ensure the security of transactions and the characteristics of decentralization.

3.2 Protocol Design and Key Innovations

The key innovations of Thunderbolt include:

• Non-interactive, recursive signature delegation
• Each transfer uses a "new lock"
• Leave a trace on the chain only once
• You won't lose money even when offline.
• True "Proof of Machine" security

These innovations greatly enhance the efficiency and security of the protocol.

IV. Comparison of Thunderbolt with Existing Lighting Network Solutions

The main advantages of Thunderbolt compared to existing Lighting Network solutions are "security" and "theoretical completeness". It can prove the security of the protocol design and ensure that malicious users cannot unilaterally profit under any circumstances.

However, Thunderbolt also faces some challenges:

• Complex deployment, ordinary users find it difficult to get started.
• The compatibility issues of the main chain have increased the difficulty of implementation.
• The ecological support is still not perfect.

Five, the Potential Impact and Development Path of Thunderbolt

Although Thunderbolt is theoretically the optimal solution for BTCFi, its actual application is still in the early stages. Possible development paths include:

1. Integrated with Rollup, serving as the DeFi engine on the Bitcoin side.

2. Form an independent standard ecosystem, running in parallel with the main chain.

3. Replaced by a simpler solution

The greatest significance of the Thunderbolt is that it allows Bitcoin assets to possess "off-chain contract composability" for the first time. The introduction of UTXO Bundling and OP_CAT brings native programmability and higher transaction throughput to the Bitcoin network. This provides the possibility of unifying Bitcoin ecological protocols and assets, but there is still a significant distance to widespread application.