I’ve been reluctantly building on Lightning because I saw big VC money going in and to ride those coat tails and pick up on what they built.

The current fiasco with Ordinals has me doubting Lightning’s future entirely.

I don’t see any ROI for VCs when channel openings and random closures will eat all possible profits and cost reductions. Without centralised services and huge nodes investing big BTC bucks, I don’t see any way this works.

I don’t see what incentive Miners have to do anything different, they make bank on these fees. They don’t want stupid 1 sat/vb channel openings and at 100+ sat/vb I don’t see how Lightning is viable.

Perhaps at some point this destroys Bitcoin completely, I don’t see how the original “best money ever” continues when moving it even via Lightning requires either a huge upfront investment or huge fees.

Where is the incentive for Miners to even want to change the code and discourage arbitrary data storage?

Unfortunately Bitcoin’s ridiculous governance model (i.e. shouting on Twitter and some email lists with no actual ability to force a change in the code) looks increasingly like its biggest vulnerability.

Why am I wrong? #[0]​ #[1]

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How exactly does a higher fee make lightning less viable? Lightning channels opening and closing are dependent on fees, but the channels themselves are completely immune to on-chain fee fluctuations. If anything, what's happening on-chain is even more reason to embrace lightning development.

The sooner we barely need to acknowledge the chain to do 99%+ of transactions, the less the scalability tradeoff of on-chain activity is limiting. And as long as there exists the necessary record trail to the chain to prove the bitcoin is real and not fake (which lightning does perfectly) everyone knows that the money is real, even if most people never transact on-chain.

I don't believe that the high fees will destroy Bitcoin or lightning.

What we are witnessing are the market forces at work. Left alone they will work themselves out.

Incentives will drive the movement of scarce resources to more productive innovations, after all that's how we got the lightning network to begin with.

Will fees remain high forever? No one can know, but innovators will work around them in some clever way that is unpredictable.

When things start going in unfavorable directions there's a natural tendency to think that something needs to be done. This kind of thinking has led to our current financial mess.

Trust the market forces, it will work itself out. It just may not be worked out in the way that you like.

At least that's how I think about the problem. I could be way off base 🙂