Yes. And earn fees routing to compensate for the risk.
It's literally that simple.
Discussion
If it were that simple, most merchants would have adopted it. Free market proves otherwise.
And no, it's not just lack of education. Even the largest bitcoin related merchants don't run and don't have plans to run their own LN node.
Most merchants haven't adopted onchain Bitcoin either dawg.
But within the ones that have, LN adoption is a ver small % and noncustodial adoption is basically 0.
I'll go back to my original point. Onchain doesnt scale. lightning will be a necessity someday. Nothung else matters
> On-chain does not scale.
Neither does lightning 🤣. I've been running a sovereign LN node for over 2 years. It's a fun toy hobby, not gonna lie.
But I don't kid myself. LN is not THE scaling solution, although I would love to be proven wrong.
>Nothing else matters
Wrong, current users matter, not the hypothetical 8 billion people that "for sure will use bitcoin very very very soon"
Much more scalable than onchain
The fact is that adoption ofnnew technologies takes time. Lightning is good for merchants but only the very smart ones realize it so far.
silent.link
bitrefill
lnvpn
sms4sats
the list keeps growing
Look at bitrefill's usage numbers.
silent.link eventually added monero which is now overtaking LN in their revenue volume.
LN exists for over 5 years and there is no solutions for the inbound liquidity issue.
Monero is ok for now but blockchains dont scale
If rate of adoption is lower than consumer tech advances + protocol scalability improvements (xmr tx size down 80% since it was created) then it will scale over time. This is not some inviolable law of physics. Nothing stops Monero from figuring out it's own form of L2 either.
tx size still much bigger than bitcoin and there is no monero l2. Youre right that someone might figure out lightning for monero but then you have the same problems as lightning fpr bitcoin.
As it is bitcoin scales much better than monero
Why you so worried about a hypothetical mass adoption fairy tale and don't just value what works well today?
Today is mostly speculative.
If we dont reach mass adoption, Bitcoin will lose to cbdcs
CBDCs are inevitable. Bitcoin is for ANYONE who wants opt out not EVERYONE.
Most people won't, can't control general stupidity.
true, but if opting out works were going to need a whole parallel economy with hundreds of millions of participants. Anything short of that will be crushed
That's a fair point
We MUST get the normie cattle person who do not care about anything to use Bitcoin, otherwise we'll be crushed.
I don’t think Bitcoin is the barrier to adoption. The average person doesn’t want to think about protocols. It’s only when we start talking about really cool clients and how they interoperate with each other for the benefit of the user will people start migrating over.
I really should read whole threads before replying to one comment. So you’re talking about lightning adoption not Nostr. How does one separate lightning from Bitcoin?
Nonsense, if they didn't crush us in 2011-2013 during Silk Road, they will never do it.
What makes you so sure we need big numbers to avoid get stamped on?
L2 =/= Lightning
Could be zk rollups, anything. Like I said, it may not even be needed if adoption rate is low. I highly doubt the whole world is ever going to use Bitcoin much less Monero anytime soon, if ever.
Bitcoin only scales better than Monero if you are transacting completely unprivately. Start throwing in coinjoins and it start creeping towards Monero tx size and in whirlpools case surpasses it. Obfuscation is also weak privacy, nothing is hidden, the connection graph and range of amounts are all visible. Available to potentially deobfuscate with future data.
The tx cost of always doing this is also not scalable/sustainable.
https://sethforprivacy.com/posts/comparing-private-spends/#results
Actually, there are quite a few solutions now to purchase inbound liquidity. It’s not ideal, but there’s the progress .
"the main benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required"
One major problem with lightning is it has terrible UX to use in any sovereign way. That is why over 95%+ use it custodially.
No one uses LN self-custodially. Even fewer use it privately. Downloads from major wallets:
Custodial (no privacy)
Chivo >1 Million
Wallet of Satoshi >500K
Strike >500K
Bitcoin Beach Wallet >100K
Non custodial (without node, not trustless, no privacy)
Phoenix >50K
Breez >10K
Non custodial (with node, potential privacy)
Zeus >5K
I would also add the bitcoin company to the list (selling prepaid Visa cards and gift card for onchain and LN coins)