Topic: 100,000 LN Nodes, $100,000 BTC price: 2021 prediction (Read 374 times)

Yes but to run a Lightning node, you have to run bitcoind and sync the blockchain. I believe we have fewer than 100,000 people who want to run a fully synced bitcoind for free, 24/7 just to run a Lightning node.

I believe we will have "Lightning services" in that will not require us to run a node in the future.

that is one of the reasons why i strongly believe in the long term sustainability of bitcoin hence is huge rise in long term too. i see a lot of potential in Lightning Network as a serious way of increasing the adoption of bitcoin as a currency and that is the only adoption that matters most which also can increase the price and keep it up there.
otherwise the speculation adoption has rise but it never lasts.

The number of LN nodes keep rising, we are past 1700 now, I predict we will get to 2000 during this month at this rate, and like I said, you require a full node thus far to run a LN node. In the future this will not be the case, like I said, probably with some sort of compromise which I assume will be reasonable for the task (LN is not supposed to be used for big amount).

The number of nodes will keep growing along with the price. It's in the incentive of hodlers to have a strong network, therefore the more money held on BTC, the higher the node count. A decentralized array of nodes is important, not only node count, which is why we can't afford huge block sizes.

Also true, it is not impossible but something that is more likely not to happen. How many nodes are running in the Bitcoin network today? I believe it is under 10,000 nodes? Plus are they increasing or decreasing?


It will not be necessary to run a node to use Lightning, you mean? That is also true and it will give it a little more of a hub and spoke model which is more efficient in my opinion.

2021 is not far from now and I hope this your predictions come to pass as many of us buy Bitcoin when it was bubble in price in December thinking we would get to around  $25,000 before this time. If bitcoin get to $100,000 then the holders will be the greatest benefitiary and it will be worth investing.

It's not impossible, specially if the blockchain stays at an affordable growth rate of 1MB blocks, the hardware will always be affordable to keep the entire blockchain. As the price grows, the incentives to have more nodes will be there, since without a decentralized array of nodes the network is completely useless as it becomes weak.

But in any case, eventually to run nodes in LN you will not need the entire blockchain, but I guess it will come with a price in security, so ideally you want as many full nodes as possible. Keeping the blocksize affordable to run LN nodes is yet another reason to not have huge blocksizes.

True, but it would be near impossible for the Bitcoin network to reach 100,000 nodes running 24/7. Plus do you know how hard it is to sync a node these days? There is a reason why users prefer light or online wallets.

Storage may not be a problem to some of you but bandwidth is for most of us.

Your predictions are heavily contingent on the large companies using the Lightning Network, but what if that doesn't happen? Steam used to accept bitcoin, but they stopped recently due to (probably) the confirmation times. Wouldn't it be a little odd if they start accepting it again? I guess the lightning network solves any issues that Steam may have had with the cryptocurrency, but it would be odd if they flip flop around the subject.

I do see this all working out if the big companies want to use the LN, but isn't it true that the LN brings some form of centralization to a what should be decentralized currency? I swear I've seen people talking about how it brings centralization into the picture, but I'm not 100% sure on how the LN works.

The problem is when you have guys with massive megaphones in the form of twitter such as Roger Ver, McAfee and others, they can move markets, specially in a young market like Bitcoin.

In mature markets you would expect people holding huge amounts to be very informed and not fall for the FUD, but in Bitcoin you can find complete idiots holding massive amounts, so FUD will be effective until the coins are distributed among smart, strong hands. Until that happens the highs and lows will continue being massive during mania phases. Im not sure how effective fee FUD is, but it's a factor.

If it's not FUD about fees, it'll be FUD about something else. I'm not too worried. Bitcoin's phenomenal rally last year actually coincided with significantly rising fees. So I'm not convinced fees (or perception of fees) is a major barrier to price. In a bull market, FUD doesn't phase the market at all. As long as the fundamentals around Bitcoin's value storage properties remain intact, I think the long term trend will continue.

I also don't think LN will "solve" the problem per se. It's just one avenue to offload some transaction volume, reinforcing the idea that Bitcoin operates best as a settlement layer. I quite like what @evoskuil said about that here:

Companies that don't want to deal with the volatility of Bitcoin could either insta sell for fiat or just wait for Bitcoin to be a store of value worth trillions, so once we have a marketcap that's worth similarly to gold, the volatility will be low enough, but Bitcoin will never have a stable price against fiat, that's just impossible.

I don't see how LN wouldn't allow merchants to insta sell for fiat if they dumb enough enough to not see how it's a good idea to have a steady source of Bitcoin income that you can use to accumulate. I mean what does Gabe or whoever else have to lose? they would be getting fiat and Bitcoin at the same time, can't go wrong with that strategy.

But yeah, ultimately BTC is a gold substitute. If someday somehow it becomes the de-facto global currency, then merchants will not have to have this mentality of constantly having to think how much it is in fiat, it will be 1BTC=1BTC, so no more volatility problems. How do we get there and when, I have no idea.

I think the stated reasons for most companies stopping their acceptance of bitcoin was due to its high volatility. Although the lightning network is a great innovation, I don't think it will see its full potential until you are able to pay with bitcoin that is instantly converted into dollars or whatever the local currency. I think this will be difficult from both a tax standpoint and a fees standpoint. Most companies really do not want to speculate on the price of bitcoin, and they shouldn't have to. Maybe if there was a way to instantly hedge until the bitcoin could be successfully sold. An anti-bitcoin if you will.

I believe the #1 priority for Bitcoin is and must be store of value properties, and we already got these, anyone that wanted could diversify their portfolios and hold Bitcoin.

The Winklevoss brothers for instance are pioneers at this, and more will follow, driving the price up. These people tend to be long term holders, so once they buy, these coins will be out of the market, driving the price up permanently.

As to "we don't need LN to go to the moon". We don't, if we get the big whales to diversify within Bitcoin, and I believe it eventually will happen, like I said, other whales will follow Winkevoss footsteps, but it is also a good thing to have a payments solutions on top of Bitcoin, if the demand comes, you must be ready, mostly to avoid all that bad press about insane fees and bad transaction times. Im just not so sure about Bitcoin being a viable store of value if we get permanent bad press about how the fees and the transactions are a mess for these wanting to transact. For us holders that us irrelevant, but you don't want that constant FUD on the mainstream media, so if LN solves that, it's better than nothing. Just imagine that Gabe decides to accept Bitcoin again... if Bitcoin doesn't have a proper way to deal with more transactions, they would probably pick BCash, and we don't really want that don't we?

I would not mind that your predictions come true,100k $ for 1 BTC would be a really nice price,but how long this price could be maintained since most would choose to sell everything they have at this price and I believe a lot before.So up to 100k $ and then correction to 30-40k$ maybe?

In some of your previous posts your views were something different regarding BTC price increase,that's why I am a little surprised now that you think LN may have some impact on the price.


I think that main force which can make BTC more valuable than today is mass adoption,but not valuable in a way of pump and then dump to 30-40% of the previous value.If BTC become something most used by ordinary people and not only few individuals who manipulate the market and the price and make profits in that.

Of course store of value is something which should not be ignored,and will definitely play a big role when it comes to the price-some people will never consider BTC as currency but only as a possible valuable asset.

Somehow I don't think you were the only one underestimating this growth. With SegWit taking the time it did, I'm actually really surprised at how quickly LN's picking up. This is what you call flying under the radar...


Precisely. I'm not much for lol'ing and I'm ready to admit I'd hedge my bets any day with anything that has a semblance of financial might (which, BCash at least seems to have) but can't help cracking a lip smiling every update I see from them. Same goes for any alt showing off their "problem-free" environments. Problems are good, as it means you actually have users to cause those problems.

frankly compared to elastic block of pivx (and zpiv and zpiv staking) it's a little bit too late .

there will always be people who are going to run a node whether it is a bitcoin full node or a lightning node on top of it and other people who are going to use lightweight clients that use their full nodes.
just like now that there are a lot of users using Electrum than there are users running an Electrum Node.
I don't think we can call this centralization.

OP, I assume you run a node too? How easy is it to run a Lightning node? It also needs you to run bitcoind, correct?

I believe a hub and spoke model for the Lightning Network would be a better set up in the beginning if the real intention was to "scale" Bitcoin. I don't mind it to be semi-centralized to be quite honest.

What's the connection between the future exponential number of lightning nodes and Bitcoin's price?
Less transaction cost through a haywire network is only going to help BTC to reach the mainstream, that wont guarantee a higher trading price.

Check out the site, there's a lot of channels (I remember, earlier this year there are only 3-huge hubs in the center and some smaller ones around them, now the site can't be rendered without lagging an ancient rig),
I wonder what will happen to the whole network once LN become the standard of micro-payment of almost all internet things and online stores.

just like bitcoin adoption, LN adoption is going to be like an S curve. as new clients are released and as they become more user friendly with their bugs fixed, more nodes will start running and more channels will be created. i think this year we will see a big rise to begin with and hopefully by next year (2019) we see at least one major usage for it like on some exchange platform.
and hopefully more decentralized exchanges with Atomic Swaps.


the correct statement is "nobody cared enough to keep on attacking bitcoin cash". it happened already. i think it was 2 months ago that there was a successful spam attack against bitcoin cash which lasted about 2 days. it filled all the blocks to 8 MB and created a big backlog and increased the fees with success. but you know it is hard to spam attack when blocks are only 100 kB (1% full)!!!

Lightning network is not much of a deal from a trader's perspective, don't ya think? I'd be lying if I say I know alot about lightning network but from what I know, it is yet to be launched fully in implementation. And 100k is too much of a random speculation, unless there are more facts that make it so. Like any sort of survey or article? I'd be surprised if we even hit 50k because you know how crazy stupid things people are up to.

LN is the main focus right now, but in the coming years we'll be seeing more off-chain layers contributing to more usability, so I see it just as the first initial step towards more bullish developments we'll be experiencing.

I do agree that LN is a major potential price driver, but it will be mainly in speculative terms, which as we have seen throughout the years, hasn't exactly been a reliable and sustainable form of increase.

I rather see the price go up steadily than focusing on certain events feeding more speculation and dumps afterwards because people expect far too much to happen, which basically happened with SegWit as well.

Hard to time it, but three years is definitely possible. The supply is so limited and blow-off tops are so unpredictable that tagging $100,000 was possible this year (though clearly won't happen now). But that's the thing about hype cycles. Fundamentals aren't very important during strong trending markets.

Anyway, I think Bitcoin's headed there regardless of Lightning.


Caring about merchant adoption? What is this, 2014?! If people are adopting BTC as a store-of-value (rather than a micropayment rail) then we don't need Steam et al.

I wish you are right - but that scenario is overly optimistic. Steam used to accept Bitcoin and that option has been removed some time ago.
There is no telling if Gabe will be eager to accept Bitcoin again anytime soon, if ever.
LN on paper seems amazing concept - but we could say the same about SegWit and we all know what happened and how difficult it was to introduce it.

Exactly! Nobody cares. Even when the Bitcoin mempool got clogged Litecoin was a more preferable alternative for people than Bitcoin cash.

Lightning Network + Halving than we will see above 50k very easy.
until Lightning Network i dont see any chance to go over 15k

Not really, even if LN fails, the fundamentals of BCash are already broken at layer 0, Bitcoin would remain the #1 store of value. If people are stupid enough to go all in on BCash, it will be a matter of time in which BCash gets attacked. The only reason the network hasn't been attacked is because nobody cares.

Let's just wait and see, Craig Wrigh announced many things recently, let's see how it goes in practice, it's easy to promise things until they are in the wild and being attacked.

Also LN is still in the early stages, it wouldn't be the end of the world if it happens now, there's not even $1million worth of money in the network.

one tx censored and banned and it's over for this "system"... and bcash will be king. don't fuck it.

Turns out my estimations of the Lightning Network's growth were underrated, I was using an outdated explorer that was listing less nodes, use this explorer for the updated amount of nodes:

https://rompert.com/recksplorer/

This is the old url:

https://lnmainnet.gaben.win/

Notice how there's 300 new LN nodes in the other url that the old url is not caching.

LN seems to be growing pretty fast, it will eventually go parabolic once it's easier to run. Right now (I think) you need a full Bitcoin node to run a node, but eventually they will make it so anyone can run an LN node without running a full Bitcoin node.

By 2021 I predict big companies like Steam, eBay or even Amazon starting to accept Bitcoin payments through a much more robust and user friendly LN. Coupled with the store of value properties which will remain as solid as always, the combination will make the price go beyond $100,000.