I consider LN a done deal. The reasons were briefly posted on twitter already but since twitter account is deleted I'll provide them again here.

1) Serious LN dev is hard and time consuming, I no longer have time or resources to keep it up or even maintain what has been developed so far. In my opinion the whole LN protocol is overly complex and is getting worse and at this point can only be developed by very few high profile specialists at a very slow pace. Philosophically, I think Bitcoin as a protocol should have a complexity barrier such that it does not get beyond a point where laymen just can't understand and trust it, I think LN has already passed that barrier.

2) It's been 6+ years of struggle to get LN anywhere beyond a community of mostly ideological users with no visible success or perspective. My opinion is ultimately LN is not what market at large wants from Bitcoin and folks should look into other directions besides dumb payments, and not overly fixate on LN.

3) Remaining LN demand has been mostly absorbed by various custodial solutions. A truly non-custodial LN wallet will always be worse than a custodial one in UX terms and historically we see that majority of remaining users consistently choose convenience over control. This makes developing end-user non-custodial LN solutions feel like the most thankless thing in the world.

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Except for Drivechain, what can be done to enable seamless Bitcoin payments at scale?

Wrong question

Phoenix is pretty great UX wise?

This kind of negativ sentiment for lightning is so hot r̶i̶g̶h̶t̶ ̶n̶o̶w̶ for already 5 years.

"that majority of remaining users consistently choose convenience over control. "

Out of sheer desperation, people will one day turn to the non-custodial wallets; all the better if those wallets will be easier to use by then. In a decentralized environment there will always be builders, cause it matters.

If laymen being able to understand a technology is a prerequisite for using it, boy do I have some bad news for you about the Internet…

I think it's reasonable to keep an eye on this. I love the use of btc lightning, and use it daily. But if this is how indi developers feel, that's not optimal in the long run.

As mentioned; worthy of keeping an eye on.

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"Philosophically, I think Bitcoin as a protocol should have a complexity barrier such that it does not get beyond a point where laymen just can't understand and trust it, I think LN has already passed that barrier."

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Is there anything wrong by continuing to use a version that does support it? I kind of have gotten used to it and it also works just fine for me.

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This is the technical layer. The liquidity requirements condemned LN from the start to VC subsidies, early adopters risking their bitcoin without being compensated (doesn't scale and isn't sustainable), and centralization. LN liquidity is cheap and works well only when we have 3 nodes in total (small number).