Shower thought, are the Lightning Network developers trying to build something that a majority of people in the whole cryptocurrency community doesn’t want? It has been years and years of development, growth of LN is there, but merchants, services, especially exchanges are very SLOW to adopt it. In fact, almost non-existent.
you seem to be not up-to-date. although you're right, the
cryptocurrency community probably wants something else like gambling, lying, loosing money and so on
Hahaha. You’re being sarcastic, but what you just posted is UNIRONICALLY TRUE.
Shower thought, are the Lightning Network developers trying to build something that a majority of people in the whole cryptocurrency community doesn’t want? It has been years and years of development, growth of LN is there, but merchants, services, especially exchanges are very SLOW to adopt it. In fact, almost non-existent.
No, that's wrong. Everyone wants or will want it, since it allows them to send BTC faster and cheaper. It certainly took many years to get to a well-working state; remember how just few years ago, everyone who was actually using it on mainnet was in the 'reckless club' and expecting to lose some funds sooner or later
It's technologically quite tricky and the protocol and implementation had to be thoroughly thought through and tested before the large audience could be tackled. It hasn't been until very recently that LN was really marketed towards the average Joe, so I am sure adoption will rise exponentially.
Merchants and services do usually offer Lightning; it's made very easy through software like
https://btcpayserver.org/.
Exchanges not yet; I suspect to collect more fees. Especially when we see exchanges charging 25 bucks to withdraw BTC, while a 1sat/vB tx costs 0.08€ to send, it becomes clear they are making big gains on those withdrawals. If people ask, they just point to
BTC and say it's because BTC is just so expensive to send, while it's not actually true.
They also simply don't actually want people to withdraw, because then people trade more, thus paying more fees to the exchange. And of course if holding custody of peoples' keys, the exchange can do an exit scam at any time. Finally, LN makes it easy and cheap to withdraw; both of which are quite bad for exchanges and also i.e. gambling sites.
Where can we see any monthly/daily graphs/data on the usage of the Lightning Network? I want actual, regular usage/utility that would give good reasons for its own existence. Where is Lightning adopted, and how much transaction volume?
any source for the bolded sentence in the quote? or do you assume too? 
) and others accept payments over lightning now
