Topic: The Lightning Network: A failure? - page 5. (Read 905 times)

Not yet failure, it just that most people don't care with lightning network.

We need to know if most people hold their coins in centralized exchanges, if they want to withdraw Bitcoin, they will use the cheapest network to send. They could use BSC chain, Kucoin chain, Lightning network etc, they don't care it's real coins or fake coins.

The rise of Lightning network will begin when people can't afford to pay on chain fees and one of those centralized chains (BSC, KCC etc) hacked/ruined, this will make people to carefully to hold their coins.

I think that we are simply just too early.
Crypto exchanges are just slowly starting to adopt LN (of course, it's a balance between earning some extra money as withdrawal fees and making withdrawals - and deposits - smoother).
Afaik LN is still labeled beta. This also doesn't help, but, since LN is still not out of problems... yeah...

The point is that a solution is necessary if we want bitcoin used as a currency by everybody. One path would be to fix LN and help it get mature. Another path would be finding/inventing other alternatives (on and off chain).



You are anti-LN and extremely harsh. You are not so far from truth, yet, not actually true either.
All service providers tried and try to offer IOUs. See PayPal and Revolut. Or remember that people kept Xapo wallets because "sending money" to each other (off chain, Xapo to Xapo) was free. I think that's now the same with Binance (and Binance Pay).

But LN needs actual Bitcoin locked for the channel. Yes, LN uses it's own units, the fact they are called Bitcoin is only convenience, and easy math because the channels are built with bitcoins.
On the other hand, it's far better than sending the bitcoins to an exchange then spend whatever odd wrapped bitcoin (i.e. IOUs on a completely unrelated blockchain).



All in all, my opinion is that LN just needs more time.
Maybe forum tips or signature campaigns offering LN payments could get LN used more at least in our community, as a form of support. Maybe...

I wouldn't call it "failed" just yet, but it's definitely is having trouble in getting adoption because if it still being complicated(correct me if I'm wrong) and clunky that you can't really expect the masses to use it just yet.

Like I said in a previous post though, I wish there was something else that Bitcoiners would bet on, not just Lightning alone.

Or fiat currency, simply. Cryptocurrencies are mostly used as an investment, and if you have an investment, which you therefore expect to be worth more in the future, and a fiat currency, which you know depreciates, which one are you going to spend to pay for a coffee? Leaving aside the scalability problems that in a hypothetical future in which everyone would want to pay for coffees with Bitcoin there would be, since the channels have to be opened in the main chain.

And stablecoins have come to be used instead of paying for coffees to lock in profits and/or avoid volatility. So you buy a shitcoin that makes you a 50x and pass it to stable coin just in case the price goes down as fast as it has risen.

Lightning Network started with very low adoption rate but it increased a lot since 2019 till 2022. Since early 2023, it started to fall dramatically and I remembered about a report on weakness and security hole in Lightning Network. Don't remember publishing time of that news but from the chart, it can be some time from July to September 2023.
https://txstats.com/d/000000012/lightning-network?orgId=1&from=now-7y&to=now

Biggest challenge from Lightning Network for users is they have to spend on-chain fee to open a Lightning Network channel, before they can use LN off-chain.

I don't consider LN is a failure. It actually has good adoption and not only for Lightning Network but look back, news about LN in 2017, 2018 and after actually helped Bitcoin adoption too.

It is not perfect, not great success but not a failure for LN or for Bitcoin.

I had posted about this last year
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.60194703

When I first heard about lightning it was almost 10 years ago. I thought it was going to be amazing. However it never really caught on and I am surprised.

I think that most people just stopped using bitcoin for micro payments and which Switched to stablecoins on l2 networks like ETH, ARB, Polygon, etc.

ETH fees are high now but they weren’t when USDT launched on it many years back. I think many people utilized it. Then they switched to maybe Tron or Solana for near free transactions.

Hence why lightning never became larger.

many merchants did try it, seen it fail and stopped using it
heck even many 3rd world countries who had issues with bitcoin fee's being more then peoples daily salary tried LN direct or indirect or bamboozled into using it thinking they were using 'bitcoin but cheaper' and they also seen the problems and hundreds-thousands of merchants of these coutries seen the issues and decided to ditch it, within months of trying it..

LN devs then seen the failure and asked for sponsorship for new work-arounds like the latest large sponsorships to develop BTCPayserver
.. yet still problems present itself even when using BTCPayserver

yet devs are still within their sponsor contract so yet to reveal(admit) publicly the flaws of this latest "please be patient" development. but yep we will learn like we have already, all roads lead to "flaws have been found"

LN is not a scaling solution its a bitcoin abandonment scheme
LN is not a solution its a flawed niche network for people to syphon funds from each other using IOU

LN is not even a sole network that majority should use. (one world currency dystopia)

what will/should happen is scale BITCOIN
and have subnetworks(plural) as NICHE services for small service offerings of multiple feature/functions.. but using subnetworks yet to even be made from scratch(learning from LN mistakes)

right now we are in the same economic joke punchline as "why is there no cure for cancer". where the punch line is "why would scientists cure cancer and then do themselves out of a job, when they can instead keep developing new problems to keep asking for fresh sets of investment funding pots.

the "please be patient" and years later flaws get public, is just the advert they use to ask for more R&D funding for the next project repeating the same flaws

It's been years since the Lightning Network was launched, yet adoption has been quite slow. Most people are still transacting on-chain, despite the fact that sometimes network fees increase to undesirable levels due to the Ordinals hype. The L2 scaling solution promised to boost mainstream adoption for BTC with its ultra-low fees and blazing-fast speeds. It's still flawed, despite being established for a few years now.

What do you think? Is the LN a failure? If not, why? Should we give it more time to mature? What is the main reason most exchanges, merchants and/or businesses haven't adopted it yet?

Your input would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.