Which SD bar?

Quantum Brewing in Kearny Mesa. Hmu if you go.

Why does lightning suck for them?

Its great when it works. But it doesnt always work. I dont want to be customer service. Shit has one job 😅

Are the meetups at the bar? I might look into a day trip.

Yessir. Second Thursday every month.

What sucks about lightning?

Unreliable.

Let me guess, self hosted? 😅

Only the BTCPay server. The LN for the merchant is using Samrock protocol (boltz swaps).

Managing the lightning side of BTCPay server has frustrated me to where I don’t maintain it today. It closes - seemingly randomly in one or three months. I just need a notification of the closing event. That would help me a lot.

Sounds like LND.

LNBIG - The Network of LND Servers With Greater Liquidity

I should have read their disclaimers…30 days inactive, they close it. Now I know what up.

What sucks the most for them? What would make Lightning better?

Lightning is awesome, when it works. I have an LNbits instance, it's mostly working when I test at home, but when I need it on the field, it's hit or miss. One day NWC stop working, zap are not passing though, next time I have the restart the app, another time it's the PoS that give strange errors for no reasons. Then you have the transactions failing even when liquidity is here at all steps until destination. And I'm not even talking about wallets, when it works smoothly it's custodial (or worst, Spark, nothing to do with Lightning), when it's not custodial you have all the limitations of Lightning but with no explanation, like Phoenix, we try to onboard no coiners, you test sending 500sats... Nothing happen. Then the user see a message that amount is too low and wondering what happened. End up sending 10 bucks at once first (to open a channel) but it cost 1000 sats (1% with 1000 sats minimum) for the service, much more than on chain cost. Not a great first user experience. In the end the bar where we do the meetup is fine accepting onchain payement even without waiting for transaction, it's not even as risky as a charge back on credit card, and even if someone try to trick you once with double spend by resending to another address with higher fee, he will just get kicked of the bar forever, not really worth it and you will not dedicate your life buy eating free everyday at s new bitcoin accepting restaurant, restaurant where you anyway pay when you have already consumed. I know long term if we all use bitcoins it will not be possible but still, it proof how far with are with Lightning UX overall.

That’s funny.. I had set up a point of sales system with BTCPay Server, way back in 2018, for a coffee shop, and we had zero issues🤷

Reliability. I dont think its fixable.

Exactly my thoughts.

Lightning payments always worked?

We never experienced any issues, at least the way I had it set up.

What’s unreliable? I would assume this is fixable

You can't easily know ahead of time of there's a path to the receiving peer. Can't make a payment if there isn't one.

Does that happen frequently? Which peers don’t have paths to them? Is it an issue of the receiving peer not managing their liquidity, or the sender not finding a route? I noticed that Lightning payments have become more expensive over time (~2500ppm now), but if you’re willing to pay that, there always seems to be a route

Youre conflating your experience with limitations of the protocol. There is absolutely no way to guarantee a payment will succeed regardless of fees. Layer 1 is all about fees. Lightning depends on a daisy chain liquidity that can change at a moments notice.

I’m speaking purely from my experience making regular payments to a wide variety of nodes

N = 1 my friend. I can't make a payment to everyone. I could figure out a workaround for edge cases but most people in my community aren't as technical as I am.

From your own node? Are you seeing payments just time out? Who are you paying? Sadly there aren’t many nodes around that receive payments but at least that makes debugging easy

My node to whatever the recipient is using. This particular frustration was with boltz and aqua.

Well that sounds like a Liquid problem, not a Lightning problem. I have seen that indeed a lot too

Liquid transaction have never failed. If anything its a boltz lightning node problem.