Is it possible to see current actual transactions-per-second of the lightning network? Why am I not able to find this easily?
#asknostr
Discussion
Where could you find a metric for global cash payments per second? You could ask a store to tell you their payments per second, but there's no central point where you can monitor and collect that metric.
Where could you find a metric for internet packets being transmitted per second? I mean you can ask a server, and heck you could probably get a good estimate from Cloudflare and Amazon since they are middle men for most internet traffic, but it isn't everything.
Same for lightning. You could probably ask WoS since they probably do a lot of transactions, but you can't ever know what you don't know.
So what do we actually know?
We know the number of channels, the bitcoin addresses related to each (something researchers and devs are working to eventually improve on).
A big node in the network can probably get a lot of info for you, I feel like there might even be a company that produces a report like this if memory serves, but I don't remember who that was.
Oh, actually because of multi-part payments, even that might be inaccurate unless you treat each part as a unique payment.
I think what is most interesting is if someone has details on number/rate of FAILED payments. Again, will be a sample of data and we don't know what percentage but we can guess.
BTW the tldr is I don't know. I was simply talking about the mechanics of why we can't know payments per second.
Wonder why some of the major operators have not published some of those stats.
Thanks form the prompt reply.
River did a year or two ago: https://blog.river.com/the-lightning-network-in-2023/
Visualizing individual transactions per second on the lightning network would be too difficult because lightning transactions are inherently private and even notes routing payments don’t know of the transactions details
You would need to monitor every single individual lighting channel, which in theory is possible, but not practical
Many many months ago I had this awesome visualiser - I’ve been searching for it for the last 10 minutes but can’t find it anywhere: there was one that basically showed which countries use it and lines going everywhere live. If I find it I’ll reply again.