This rant is long, and framed hopefully more for normies aka precoiners (plus shitcoiners who are yet to enter recovery):
According to my napkin math m, there’s currently ~$142,300,000 (though to account for the famous volatility of bitcoin, multiply your wildest potential prices of one coin by ~₿5,537.08) locked in Lightning. It’s not really “locked” though, since channels can be closed at any time.
That’s not very much if we’re talking about THE world reserve currency’s primary payment network (important to note LN isn’t the *only* one), but considering that’s not yet the context, it’s a solid start.
Also importantly, the Lightning Network is extremely liquid as in funds can be transferred between parties super fast and cheap. So any comparison to something like the Visa Network in terms of net value “settled” is arguably irrelevant.
I’m retarded but I don’t believe we necessarily know the total value settled by lightning on any particular cadence (per day etc.) especially considering that private channels exist.
I may also be crazy because, here me out - what if scarcity continues to be important 😲 and adoption continues to grow 😲 causing the price per bitcoin to continue to go up, on average, a lot 😲😲😲
Bitcoin is absolute digital scarcity, this cannot be overstated (if this doesn’t blow your mind, read some Knut Svanholm). This is also why shitcoins are shitcoins.
This means that modest fraction of a billion dollars on LN today would turn billions (>$1.6B at 300k) and eventually trillions. Not to mention a lot more bitcoin, again meaning exponentially more dollar value equivalent, would be brought into this rapid liquidity pool of global payment capacity.
I have no idea how many 2.1 quadrillionths of all the value in the world would need to be committed on-chain to multisig contracts for payment liquidity (as opposed to savings aka cold storage) to make the world go ‘round, but there’s certainly enough and that will naturally work itself out. Not to mention opendime-like “sneakernet” potential where you can skip all of that multiple times without even touching the timechain or miner fees.
I’m just gonna wrap this one up. My timing with these rants is the worst and no one sees them anyway 🤦♂️. I totally get that there are reasons to be skeptical of these lofty and non-data-based claims on multiple levels, and i feel you.
But gfy, it’s happening regardless of your opinion - so we all get to decide for ourselves whether we want to find a way to either Have Fun Stacking Sats or #HFSP. So keep stacking and for the love of god don’t shitcoin you dumb fuck 🫡 