Man oh man oh man.
I have been running a few lightning nodes for a long time (I actually had one of the first 200 on main net)... but to be honest I have not done a ton of lightning transactions. I mean I bought the requisite reckless stickers from blockstream last year and did a lot of silly shit on satoshis.place, but I quit moving bitcoin around just for fun years ago.
So tonight I have just been horsing around... and I feel like it's 2011.
I have 2 lightning wallets on my phone, and am running Zap on a PC and lnd on a little server...
I have been sending about 3 millions sats around from my phone to my phone to my desktop to my little server to my phone etc.
IT IS INSTANT!!! Usually the receiving wallet says it has the payment before the sending wallet knows it's gone! And as soon as I get it I can spend it, and it costs basically NOTHING.
The people who are clamoring about how this will become centralized are wrong. It will be distributed, and there will be some big hubs for liquidity... and those hubs will compete for fees and there will not be much incentive to charge a lot.
It just hadn't sunk in 'till tonight. This is going to change the world, gentlemen. It's a kludgy mess right now, but as they add features to this it is going to become a monster. AND YOU DON'T HAVE TO CHANGE BITCOIN. On chain is on chain forever. Lightning doesn't change that.
What it changes is the future.
If you have not tried it. you need to fucking try it. You need to set up two nodes and send sats back and forth.
This is gentlemen.