That’s literally awesome dude, but if the merchant isn’t accepting bitcoin, then it makes literally no difference than buying a gift card and doing this with someone else.

This is using Lightning as a payment mechanism, which is important and a big part of adoption. But the bigger problem is getting people to hold bitcoin as their dominant money, and both merchant adoption, and the ability to use it *without* merchant adoption, are critical to that.

Both are necessary for adoption from both the merchant and user side, and from the monetary base and payment side.