Does the Lightning Network still hold a future?

[Abiky]

The controversial L2 scaling solution has been years in the making, yet it has suffered from lack of mainstream adoption. At the time of this writing, there are many merchants and/or services that still don't support LN payments. For something that promises ultra-low fees and blazing-fast transaction speeds, LN should've been accepted almost everywhere by now. Imagine going to your favorite coffee shop or restaurant and paying with the LN like a breeze.

While the LN does have its benefits, it isn't the perfect solution. There are many flaws that need to be addressed. Especially in terms of UX, and high centralization risks.

What do you think? Is there still a future for the LN? Or is it game over? Your input would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[Hashblock]

If you ask me I won’t say it’s a game over for lightning, but I also don’t think we should expect it to become the universal payment method anytime soon.
The biggest challenge with the LN is not really with the speed or fee. Obviously those are already impressive. The challenge is the UX. most normal users don’t want to understand channels, liquidity, routing, backup, or why payment suddenly failed. If paying with bitcoin requires understanding all of that, mainstream adoption will always be difficult.
Centralization is also a valid concern, lightning isn’t inherently centralized, but there are more incentives for liquidity and routing to concentrate around larger, well connected nodes. That’s something the ecosystem need to keep watching carefully.

IMO, lightning still has a future, especially for small and frequent payments where putting everything on-chain doesn’t make sense. But it success will depend on whether the developer can hide most of the complexity from the user while still preserving bitcoin’s self custody and permissionless nature. If that can be solved then it’s worth not writing LN off yet.

[Swordsoffreedom]

It’s not that every merchant need to run their own Lightning node to make LN payment success.



Look at this, Square is integrating Bitcoin payment at much larger scale for eligible merchant, where merchant don't need to manage Lightning infrastructure themselves. That mean a portion of adoption is happening on backend, which is invisible to the user.

But I get your main point. Hmm, Lightning's UX is still not as simple as Bitcoin on-chain.

In my opinion, Lightning definitely has some future, but its future may not be a model where everyone has to run their own node and every store need to accept LN directly. Such complexity can be hidden from user through infrastructure of wallet, exchange, payment processor and application.