Did we forget about the lighning network?

[franky1]

This is the scaling solution when the network is congested, especially during a price surge. This often happens when in a bull run trend. This significant advancement aims to make transactions faster and cheaper. It could potentially rescue web3 platforms. This is a clear indication that this protocol is finding new applications.
While I'm browsing for some results, it's interesting to note that the world's first decentralized exchange (DEX) to support the Lightning Network has recently been launched.

UXUY gets idiots to download their app and gives them unfunded(not secured) onscreen balance of upto X amout of msats.. which cannot be claimed unless you go through their central hub to close the channel and hope the hub honours the balance
funny how they want to call it a "free air drop"

reality is that the DID uxuy service is not even a DEX because there is a central hub that is controlling the msat balance and channel ID's without individuals actually getting real sat value under their own real settled key to lock/fund the channel
(a secure service would use the funding lock as channel id to prove msats are backed by the keys used within the channel)

many services pulled this trick which is why LN cannot be trusted

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[Poker Player]

Because if you have bitcoin and fiat to pay for that coffee you can
- spend the fiat and basically do nothing for adoption
- buy bitcoin with fiat and pay with that coffee with LN, you still keep your previous stash intact and you use the fiat you were spending anyway

I usually see you write potent arguments but what you just said seems to me to be a joke. It had to be at some point, I guess.

The growth of LN and Bitcoin adoption has to come because of a demand and a need for real usage, not because some Bitcoiners try to increase usage in an artificial way like that.

[franky1]

Because if you have bitcoin and fiat to pay for that coffee you can
- spend the fiat and basically do nothing for adoption
- buy bitcoin with fiat and pay with that coffee with LN, you still keep your previous stash intact and you use the fiat you were spending anyway

I usually see you write potent arguments but what you just said seems to me to be a joke. It had to be at some point, I guess.

The growth of LN and Bitcoin adoption has to come because of a demand and a need for real usage, not because some Bitcoiners try to increase usage in an artificial way like that.

why obsess over LN? why think its the only solution/answer?
its a failed experiment
there will be other subnetworks that offer utility away from onchain use, but LN is not defacto 'the solution'
other subnetwork bridges already exist that have exceeded LN's liquidity..

[FinneysTrueVision]

Recent innovations in Lightning made me curious enough to give it another try. I managed to open a channel with a few hundred dollars and everything went smoothly for a few days. Unfortunately an OS update corrupted my wallet and I had to spend several hours trying to figure out how to recover funds from a channel. It is not as simple as typing in a mnemonic. To make matters worse the wallet I used encountered a bug when sweeping the on-chain BTC, after force closing my channel, that resulted in a lot of unnecessary fees. Perhaps different scaling solutions like sovereign rollups will gain more traction because this unpleasant experience doesn't make me too optimistic about Lighting becoming widely adopted.

[NotATether]

This is the scaling solution when the network is congested, especially during a price surge. This often happens when in a bull run trend. This significant advancement aims to make transactions faster and cheaper. It could potentially rescue web3 platforms. This is a clear indication that this protocol is finding new applications.

Rescue web3 platforms? Sorry, but Web3 apps do not exist inside Bitcoin (yet). In fact, given the current way that Web3 is being used inside Ethereum by people to create money-making protocols, I don't think that Bitcoin even needs such functionality anyway, since it would just be abused like Taproot is right now.

[franky1]

This is the scaling solution when the network is congested, especially during a price surge. This often happens when in a bull run trend. This significant advancement aims to make transactions faster and cheaper. It could potentially rescue web3 platforms. This is a clear indication that this protocol is finding new applications.

Rescue web3 platforms? Sorry, but Web3 apps do not exist inside Bitcoin (yet). In fact, given the current way that Web3 is being used inside Ethereum by people to create money-making protocols, I don't think that Bitcoin even needs such functionality anyway, since it would just be abused like Taproot is right now.

no,, just no (yet again NotATether, no)

web3 is not inside bitcoin nor inside ethereum

web3 is the decentralised sector of the internet where crypto belongs inside web3


web1 is where normal webpage domains exist within
web2 is where phone apps and such exist
web3 is the decentralised systems

many people have not fully grasped the potential of what can be done within the decentralised systems within web3.
bitcoin is a good example that first even made web3 a new sector, but there is so much more possibilities

web3 is not a narrow toolbox of code that blockchains need to incorporate for a blockchain to then be web3
web3 is the sector of the internet where decentralised systems already live

its a industry sector, not a small codebase

[freedomgo]

The Lightning Network was literally the technology needed to enable Bitcoin to be adopted as legal tender at nation-state level.

El Salvador made bitcoin a legal tender in 2021, but the country has just adopted lightning network some weeks back. Lightning network makes bitcoin transaction to be cheap and faster which is the reason it was created. If there are more people making use of lightning network, also the mempool will be less congested if compared to if lightning network is not existing.

If this has existed a long time ago and it would solve the problem of network congestion, what do you think is the reason why people are not adopting with it? If there's a way to increase its adoption, how do you think it has to be done?

Honestly, this network congestion will not gonna go away, it will happen from time to time especially if the market is quite bullish as it's expected that more transactions will be created, so we need some long term solution, unless we don't see it as a major problem yet.

[Charles-Tim]

If this has existed a long time ago and it would solve the problem of network congestion, what do you think is the reason why people are not adopting with it? If there's a way to increase its adoption, how do you think it has to be done?

According to many reports, lightning network adoption continue to increase. Here is an example:

https://beincrypto.com/bitcoin-lightning-network-transactions-research/

Honestly, this network congestion will not gonna go away, it will happen from time to time especially if the market is quite bullish as it's expected that more transactions will be created, so we need some long term solution, unless we don't see it as a major problem yet.

If Spiderchain is implemented, maybe it can be of help. It will use PoS algorithm that is proposed while not affecting the onchain which is PoW.

[Jet Cash]

I guess I am one of the guilty parties. I haven't looked at lightning as a means of accepting payments. Maybe I should see if it can be incorporated into Ebay in some way.

[PrivacyG]

I used Lightning Network a few times.  It is however too complex for my liking.  Either this or it has some flaws that need to be sorted out first.

I got my balance stuck a few times in the past.  I sent my Bitcoin through Lightning Network only to realize hours later that it actually never went through.  But again maybe it was my fault.

Anyway.  I prefer the OG Bitcoin to be honest with you.  Lightning Network is perfect for who understands it but not for my liking.  I am waiting for a better alternative which I am sure will pop up some day.

[panganib999]

The Lightning Network was literally the technology needed to enable Bitcoin to be adopted as legal tender at nation-state level.

El Salvador made bitcoin a legal tender in 2021, but the country has just adopted lightning network some weeks back. Lightning network makes bitcoin transaction to be cheap and faster which is the reason it was created. If there are more people making use of lightning network, also the mempool will be less congested if compared to if lightning network is not existing.

But did it really meet the public's demands is the question we should be asking ourselves. It's good enough that we have a premium option like that which would allow us to cheapen and hasten our transactions but if it was that good, why is the lightning network dying? It's because it's just not as amazing as it was made out to be in the past.

If we're looking for layer 2 solutions, we should look elsewhere besides the lightning network, the intent is great and the execution, I guess you can't say anything that's bad about it, but there has to be something off about it for people to not reliably and consistently use it for all their transactions cause let's face it, if it were the case we wouldn't have massive congestions like what happened when Ordinals was at a massive high in hype.

[dothebeats]

Oh I'm sure people still remembers LN as clear as day. There's tons of issues that have risen after El Salvador has used it. It has since become the case study that people reference to whenever they want to explain that LN isn't going to work. It sounds like it could work on paper, but when volume is already within the said channel, bugs and issues arose and even the devs themselves admit that it wouldn't be an easy fix. I mean, why introduce something as the 'savior' of bitcoin transactions when even you yourself admit that it isn't what you thought it should be anyway?

If there's anything LN helped in the bitcoin ecosystem, it is to open the minds of devs that it's possible, though the implementation would be somewhat difficult and it needs a more ingenious approach if it's going to be used by a lot of people.

[stompix]

Because if you have bitcoin and fiat to pay for that coffee you can
- spend the fiat and basically do nothing for adoption
- buy bitcoin with fiat and pay with that coffee with LN, you still keep your previous stash intact and you use the fiat you were spending anyway

I usually see you write potent arguments but what you just said seems to me to be a joke. It had to be at some point, I guess.
The growth of LN and Bitcoin adoption has to come because of a demand and a need for real usage, not because some Bitcoiners try to increase usage in an artificial way like that.

It's not artificial usage as long as it's genuine.
You don't pay for that cup of coffee with fiat you pay with Bitcoin that you bought with fiat
It's not any different from
- withdrawing money from an ATM and use cash instead of paying with a card
- much different from getting your wage and instantly converting it from pesos to usd as they do in Argentina

How else do you expect adoption to happen?
Remember the time when there were no buyers for electric cars as there were no charging stations because nobody had an electric car?

According to many reports, lightning network adoption continue to increase. Here is an example:
https://beincrypto.com/bitcoin-lightning-network-transactions-research/

When you have a research comparing numbers from 2021 to 2023 and ignoring 2022 you know there is something fishy in that 1000% growth.https://river.com/learn/files/river-lightning-report-2023.pdf
The reason is that although not mentioned the graphs are telling, the growth from 2022 to 2023 is minimal!

[hatshepsut93]

Lightning Network is not as frequently discussed as it was before because it's development is really-really slow. According to the developers it's not yet ready for production so it's not officially released, and we shouldn't entrust our hard-earned money to beta software that can have serious bugs. Who knows how many more years it will take to polish LN or if it will ever be fully stable? That's why the public is losing interest and focuses on Bitcoin as an investment and store of value.

[franky1]

When you have a research comparing numbers from 2021 to 2023 and ignoring 2022 you know there is something fishy in that 1000% growth.https://river.com/learn/files/river-lightning-report-2023.pdf
The reason is that although not mentioned the graphs are telling, the growth from 2022 to 2023 is minimal!

its good to see you noticed they used a 'stat'(cough*) of 2 years prior
you are learning to be sceptical about stats.. but you still missed out one key word from your glossary again

This represents a 1,212% increase since the 503k Lightning payments estimate for August 2021 by K33 (formerly Arcane Research).

when they use guesses, estimate of previous data. then they might aswell not make any suggestions at all

*but not even using their own stat of previous year, seems odd to use a estimate from another brand
*but not doing a july21 to july23 comparison or sept21 to sept23, or any other month compare to 2 year past..

the reason they picked specifically august 2023 and then back dated to a picky old 'stat' as their whole reason to make an announcement
is much like saying the bitcoin market 2021 ATH compared to 2019 seen x## growth. trying to make it sound like they seen same growth every months 2 year comparison before and after specific picky date, when we all know ATH is a 4 year temporary event

also august 2023 saw ALOT of channel close sessions, reducing capacity... so with river being one of the remaining routes. ofcourse they will see more traffic going through them compared to normal.. who else can users use to route payments when a section of the network closes off


also river by increasing its channels over 2 years will capture more route paths
its like franchising a coffee shop. if 1 shop serves 1000 people a day, then they open 100 coffee shops in 2 years. they should not be surprised to get 100,000 customers using their business, then if other coffee shops close then those customers then come to the remaining coffee shop

it doesnt mean more people buying coffee. it just means certain business captures the same niche of coffee drinkers

lastly
compared to 2021.. the amount of offchain "rebalance" events compared to REAL PAYMENTS has seen a rise. but stats treat rebalances as payment events

[Poker Player]

It's not artificial usage as long as it's genuine.
You don't pay for that cup of coffee with fiat you pay with Bitcoin that you bought with fiat
It's not any different from
- withdrawing money from an ATM and use cash instead of paying with a card

See, that's why I don't see it. Almost nobody pays with cash anymore and less and less, because they see it as a joke to go to the ATM to withdraw cash when they can pay with their mobile or smartwatch while sending a Whattsapp or looking at an Instagram notification. Only the few who are privacy conscious and don't want CBDCs shoved up our asses continue to pay mostly with cash. But there are fewer and fewer of us.

Mass adoption is not going to come by adopting a forced intermediate step. To which we should add that if you pay with cash you don't have tax problems.  If you buy Bitcoin and when you go to pay it has gone up 0.05% you will have to report that payment in an income tax return for capital gains tax, and it already implies having to install software that tracks all transactions because keeping track of all small payments yourself is not feasible.

[stompix]

~

See, that's why I don't see it. Almost nobody pays with cash anymore and less and less, because they see it as a joke to go to the ATM to withdraw cash when they can pay with their mobile or smartwatch while sending a Whattsapp or looking at an Instagram notification. Only the few who are privacy conscious and don't want CBDCs shoved up our asses continue to pay mostly with cash. But there are fewer and fewer of us.

Depends a lot of where you look at, as I mentioned a  lot of times, personal impressions lead to a biased and really flawed view of the world.
If I were to judge it from my personal experience and that of friends and co workers, I would say the same, moreover why do we need cashiers as all of use self pay machines in superstores.

But!, if we look at our local shop owned by my family, nothing much has changed from:

My family has kept a small shop for out products (meat) because of the ambition of my father to still sell to the average joe customer and not only to a big reseller
Of course, since most of the customers in that small shop are elderly people who want to buy fresh products they deal obviously with cash, and here comes the shitload of problems.

I know the habit of all those customers, they get their pension on the 3rd or 5th, they go to the ATMs near the marketplace, they stand in line to get the cash, then go back home to leave the wad of cash and then with just a few bills they drop by our shop and paying cash.
The coffees shop next to ours has probably 5% payments in cash, we barely had 1-2% before covid.

If you buy Bitcoin and when you go to pay it has gone up 0.05% you will have to report that payment in an income tax return for capital gains tax, and it already implies having to install software that tracks all transactions because keeping track of all small payments yourself is not feasible.

Pretty simple to do it, you already have a machine that tracks your receipts as you're forced by law to do so.
At the end of the day when you have to do the balance the machine will simply spit out how much have you got in Bitcoin and how much that means in your accounting, so 0.1 BTC that you acquired at a cost of 4000 lets' say, you make a payment to your exchange worth that much just as how would deposit cash to your bank at the end of the day and that's it, it's really nothing fancy or complicated.
Think of it like a guy selling their coins in waves on Binance, you can get a statement at the end of the day with a click.

Trust me, comparing this to some stuff like an invalid IOSS VAT on a replaced warranty package from outside the EU that a company has shipped form a different country than the previous is, nothing! Nothing I tell you!  

[el kaka22]

It is not something we "forget" but it never picked up pace and nobody really ended up being all that shocking in the end, nobody uses it so why would we talk about it or discuss it. Sure it looks like it's fast enough and cheap enough, but are we using it? Who uses it? Which exchange or casino or website uses it? I do not think that any of them do, we are not there at all and we should not be doing anything that would not be used, who cares about a thing that nobody likes.

That's the problem with LN, it is not liked, it is not marketing enough, and because of that people do not care about it at all, we just need to accept that fact and move on. If it gets enough attention one day then we can start to consider the situation a little differently.

[franky1]

That's the problem with LN, it is not liked, it is not marketing enough, and because of that people do not care about it at all, we just need to accept that fact and move on. If it gets enough attention one day then we can start to consider the situation a little differently.

marketing is not the issue. infact its been mentioned too much.. the problem is that LN is a lazy unfinished network with lots of problems but being promoted as some fluffy promise of utopian hope of being the solution to bitcoin congestion.. (congestion caused by core devs lack of desire to scale bitcoin)

many people and even countries governments had tried using it. and within months of using it, soon want to close the channels and not want to use it again

el salvador would rather use a CEX as a funds custodian than use LN, after their experience of using LN in 2021
as do many millions of users that got suckered into accepting LN msat balance via a service but found they had no control to unilaterally close a 'tempId' channel with 'rented balance'. so they moved funds back to the service and never requested LN balance again. now they prefer to exit services either direct to real bitcoin network(accepting fee losses) or use an alt/stable/other subnetwork bridge as their way to move funds out of a service

[Kelward]

Just a breif: The Lightning Network was literally the technology needed to enable Bitcoin to be adopted as legal tender at nation-state level. It is integral in Bitcoins evolution as a monetary asset from a store of value to both a medium exchange and unit of account. It is a game-changer homies and if it can get even more adoption, it can create further waves in many nations, especially those with truly decimated centralized national Fiat currencies. So why did we forget about it so soon and its not been talked about much in the forum.

This is a thread that has all the lightning network threads all together. Let's go through it nd enjoy the ride - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5345664.0

In order for a technology to become a part of our daily life, it needs to be simple and easy to understand. Lightning network is a complex bit of technology and a lot of people are still unsure how to use it. There are many flaws and bugs in it as well.

LN is useful but the developers need to Dig deeper to find out why people are not using it! LN has a long long way to go.

I've never used lightening network before, despite how they said that it cuts off high transaction fees and that it's very fast. Truth is that people who are more knowledgeable than me have not endorsed it, that is what made me lazy to try it for transactions. Just as you have noted if a technology is complex to use, then it can discourage people from attempting to use it, the way that I heard about it's complexity is a discouragement for me to try to use it.

I really hope that it's developers will look into it and see how they can make it to be less complex in usage, because I believe that lightening network can boost the adoption of Bitcoin.