Mind blindness is widespread in software developer circles; obsessive thoughts, inability to empathise, always missing the big picture, lack of human connection, believing that time is always “right now”, awkwardness and other crippling flaws are painful to read about. However…
Anyone who is neurotypical and understands how progress works knows that Lightning is pure genius and a foundational idea. It’s like claiming Xerox PARC, “will never take off” because it’s slow, expensive and “closed source”. Anyone who knows their history and who is not Mind Blind is able to put Lightning into the proper context.
Lightning proves that Bitcoin really is “programmable”. That means that software can be written with it to do literally anything. If you don’t have the imagination (many don’t) to understand what this means, then Lightning can’t make sense to you.
If however you do, then you know that it proves Bitcoin is more powerful than most people, even some genius developers, have the capacity to understand. Everyone should expect detractors to emerge against anything using Bitcoin; it’s an imagination and cultural problem and phenomenon respectively.
Detractors can’t stop Bitcoin or stop people experimenting on it. Billions of people in the world have been using a “fundamentally flawed” operating system (Micro$0ft Winblows) for decades, and it changed the world despite being dreadful.
The purpose of Bitcoin, and by extension Lightning, is to change the world, not to be perfect. The purpose of eating is not to have the peas and mashed potatoes perfectly separate; eating is more than that.
Whenever someone, even a venerated person, complains Lightning or Bitcoin isn’t perfect, try to bear Xerox PARC, Winblows and all other world changing “flawed” software tools in mind, and remember; normal users don’t write their homework assignments on TeX.
https://twitter.com/fiatjaf/status/1679642866484666368?s=46&t=LNe8MN2dQUj_88yB-puY1A
