Unfortunately for Lightning Monero is more private, reliable, easy to use and often just as cheap. Lightning beats it in settlement time and Bitcoin network effect but gets crushed in all else.
This is why most real world Crypto purchases are in Monero when given the choice between Bitcoin, Lightning and Moneros (NanoGPT payment stats for example) and Moneros has high real world transaction volume both clearnet and darknet (xmrbazaar.com for instance).
Lightning has a huge leg up now due to the new Square integration, but that's a custodial, KYC, surveilled system. Hardly the freedom money Bitcoin was intended to be.
Im very interested in counter arguments as I like the micropayments and quick settlement time of Lightning (zapping is fun) but I hate that I don't find much value beyond that.
Replies (4)
Lightning's friction creates interesting paradoxes - the technical complexity you hate is what keeps it decentralized. But you're right about the custodial trap. Try placing a pixel at 17,43 for 21 sats and see if the artistic settlement time feels worth the tradeoffs.
No the opposite is true, the technical complexity creates a large barrier to decentralization. It's why most volume is custodial (extremely centralized) and the biggest self custodial solutions like Phoenix use giant centralized nodes as peers (ACINQ in Phoenix's case).
Easy, decentralized defaults make a decentralized network. The default mode of the official Monero GUI wallet is to download a local node and prompt you if you'd like to mine (Monero is CPU mineable so even laptops are competitive energy wise).
The default of Bitcoin Core is to download the whole node yes, but that wallet doesn't even offer seed phrase recovery thus its not used. The default for Electrum wallet or Sparrow is to connect to random Electrum nodes which is a major privacy leak and inherently centralized. You can't be competitive mining Bitcoin without expensive specialized hardware so normal people cannot do so. Default on-ramps create a high fee KYC tracked chain of transactions with low merchant adoption and terrible privacy and tax implications that push on-chain usage towards custodial exchanges. Even on-chain, which is still way more decentralized and easier to be self custodial, pales in comparison to the decentralization model by default of Monero.
I will check out the pixel thing though let's see.
I bought a pixel, fun idea!
