Lightning Network May Not Solve Bitcoin's Scaling 'Trilemma'

Bitcoin has proven incapable of accommodating growing demand without deviating considerably from Satoshi Nakamoto's original vision of a "peer-to-peer electronic cash system."

It was intended to provide a fast, secure and inexpensive means of making payments without using the traditional financial system. Today it still only manages a tiny proportion of the traffic of, say, Visa or Mastercard, yet has become cripplingly slow and very expensive.

Solving bitcoin's scaling problem has become a principal concern of developers. But the problem has proved intractable.

Now, making a virtue out of necessity, the buzz is that bitcoin is "digital gold." Its built-in limit of 21 million bitcoins makes it an ideal anchor for a hard-money financial system similar to a strict gold standard. A new payment system could be built on top of it.
The problem is, it isn't possible to have full decentralization, a fixed money supply and sufficient liquidity for an efficient payments system. This is bitcoin's "trilemma."