There are some serious issues with Bitcoin.

But... Lightning is not one of them. Development is advancing fast. New deployments in 2025 make Lightning MUCH better than it was just 12 months ago.

The real issue is people's expectations. People thought Lighting was going to be a panacea.... a perfect solution. But it is not.... and it will not be. It is just another layer in the stack... another tool in our tool-belt.

Lightning will be the glue that holds other layers together. But at least now, small merchants have the ability to use it in a self-custodial way, if they choose to. It gives us freedom, compared to what we used to have under the central banking elite. It's amazing, for people who are willing to learn. And for those who aren't, there are amazing Layer-3's such as Fedimints which use Lighting in the backend.