Is it just me or has there been way less enthusiasm for Lightning in the past 1 or 2 months?
Last week, I've installed a LN wallet (Eclair) for the first time. It didn't all go exactly as I expected, but all in all I'm quite impressed. I've made more transactions in a week just for testing LN than I've made in Bitcoin in months. I'm convinced low fees for small transactions is what Bitcoin needs to grow (be it with LN or some other system).
Some of the unexpected things I ran into:
1. After funding the channel, I had no receiving capacity. I only got that after sending some funds.
2. The amount available to send was less than what I deposited. I first thought it was a reservation for fees to broadcast it to the blockchain, but later on the available amount went up a bit. It's still not as much as I've put into the channel.
3. I'm not sure how long the channel will stay open if I don't close it. Maybe forever, unless the other party closes it?
4. I have no idea how high fees will be to close the channel, maybe I can manually set them, maybe I can't.
5. Synchronizing Eclair takes quite a while after installation, but it also takes longer than for instance Electrum when I start it up.
6. Eclair somehow didn't use my full balance to open a LN channel, it left 600 satoshi in a change address. I'm pretty sure I chose to use the maximum amount, so it shouldn't have created Bitcoin dust.
Good things:
1. I bought virtual flowers on
https://niffler.co/bitcoin-graveyard/2. I painted a few pixels on
https://satoshis.place/3. I gambled a few Satoshis on
https://lightning-roulette.com/ (my 100 Sat deposit never arrived at the site, I don't know why, but I'm pretty sure this isn't LNs fault)
4. I bought some Doge coins at
https://www.coinplaza.it/ (this seems to be a great way to increase or decrease funding or receiving capacity of a channel). For this transaction I paid the highest fee until now (10 satoshi).
5. Most of the transactions worth a few satoshi were sent without any fee.
6. Speed! It took a few seconds at most to send or receive funds.
I dislike the "fighting" that happens in many LN-threads though. Some people like it, some people don't, but for some reason the people who don't like it feel the need to keep posting about it, while the people who like it feel the need to keep responding to them. Let me put it this way: as a Bitcoin user, I don't care if small transactions are handled by a centralized organisation, in a second layer, or on-chain, as long as it's low-cost. The risk is low anyway (because of the small amounts involved). I trust several organisations with much larger amounts than I'll ever put into a Lightning channel.
What I'd like to see, is a topic with just information about LN. I'm not experienced enough yet to make one myself, but I'd like to see one that's heavily self-moderated. Disregard the guys fighting they are trying to work out a few kinks! Please notice LoyceV that LN Is still like pre-Beta lots of bugs and majority of the site operators are using opennode.co's service Only a few are built from scratch with minimal scrapers ex (Microlancer.io)
LN seems to have lost a lot of traction in the last month, However Ive raised some BTC to sponsor a LN Awareness campaign sponsored by at least 12 LN site operators, (since these are micro BTC platforms Ive convinced site owners to run a LN awareness campaign to advertise the current LN Eco-Sphere)
Adoptions going to be a little slow during rally's , but when fee's are 15k sats consistently LN will be brought to light .
And I agree OP should come here and lighten the mood!
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