Supporting him is Nik Bhatia, a bond expert who for years has traded in US government bonds on Wall Street; he talks about it cointelegraph in an interesting article published a few hours ago taking up a post published on Bhatia's blog yesterday. Thanks to the Lightning Network bitcoin has managed to combine its main quality, to be a store of value, with a high scalability that makes it suitable also for everyday micro-payments, such as the purchase of the classic coffee at the bar below home. Bhatia defines all this as something unprecedented in history and the main reason that led him to abandon the bond market; currently an adjunct professor in finance and economics at the USC Marshall School of Business, in his post on medium, he declares that he is passionate about bitcoin in 2016 and has struggled, initially, to understand the historical significance of what he was studying. Accustomed to other numbers, in other words, bitcoin seemed too small at the time compared to the markets that Bhatia was accustomed to studying, however he soon realized that he would spend the rest of his professional life studying BTC; in his article Bhatia remembers the first purchase in bitcoin, passed to monitor the status of the transaction on an explorer.

While realizing how safe the process was, he also realized that the time needed to validate the block made this system impractical for managing any type of routine daily transaction; including, therefore, that Bitcoin was destined to become digital gold, the feeling was that it could hardly have become a global currency. This type of perception passes with the discovery of Lightning Network, which makes transactions virtually instantaneous and frees them from having to wait for confirmation of the block. With this new system, Bhatia continues, Bitcoin's speed and scalability increases exponentially; in his post, in fact, we can read that:

"I decided to devote my intellectual ability to the Bitcoin Lightning network because a value reserve asset that shows the speed and scalability of a real currency is unprecedented in human history, and it's worth pursuing"

Thus it was that after a transition phase, during which Bhatia had continued to deal with both markets, he decided to abandon the bond and devote himself completely to bitcoin. It is no longer a question of whether Bitcoin is a store of value or a means of exchange, it is simply both; today Bhatia, who after discovering Lightning Network has decided to abandon his career on Wall Street, is one of the main contributors to OpenNode, a new bitcoin payment processor that aims to make the use of this currency easy and within everyone's reach to manage daily transitions.