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If the vast majority of the network usage… is just people zapping each other pennys on a niche, obscure website I don’t know what future that has.
My wife and I pay for around 40-60% of our monthly expenses via lightning or bitcoin.
That number goes up and down depending on how many places offer a way to pay with bitcoin.
There are many others like us, in many other locations too. We're not on X or reddit. Heck, most of us aren't on here, either.
All to say, be aware of the limitations of what you can see from your specific location, sources of information, and social circles.
Quick check of my Zeus Wallet the last two weeks shows many recent purchases of coffee for myself and the missus, a moisturizer for her, some minor groceries...
Is that a "big deal?" No, and I don't even think twice about it ordinarily; it's a normal part of daily life. But just like there's me, and there's you, there are certainly also several fuckloads more using L2 the same way, and we are elevating the network by doing these small actions.
Which is to say... onward 👍
Maybe you guys are… and if you are that’s great. However people like you guys or like me (I use lightning on stacker and when I can) is an incredibly small number of people.
Using lightning to transact is still somehow an incredibly niche thing, it’s a niche within a niche.
Imo there won’t be enough demand for zapping to sustain the network, especially considering that 1-2 lightning channels don’t need to be closed for weeks or months at a time and can just be… refilled.
My experience with non-custodial lightning is so good that a channel can be ‘borrowed’ or opened and kept open for months… you don’t touch on-chain that much. Great for scaling… oddly perverse to demand.
A few very technical people using lightning isn’t enough to sustain the network, at least not at a high enough hashrate without more users.
As good as lightning is, as few as people use it, it makes me question the whole concept of ‘transactional capital’ when there’s so little demand to actually use it.
Blockspace is a whopping .5 sat/vbyte. At night that’s 500$ a block in fees or 3k usd per hour. 3k per hour is all there is, in the entire world, in terms of demand for blockspace and ultimately miner rewards.
How much hashrate will 3k per hour pay for? Or 72k per day?
One thing to remember about hashrate, it is artificially boosted by tax policy (ie. bonus depreciation). Investors are buying miners because they can depreciate 100% of the cost immediately, effectively reducing (or in some cases eliminating) their tax bill.
Imagine I said to you, you can either pay a $50K tax bill to the gov and get nothing in return, or you can spend $100k and have no tax but own 10 miners which may earn you $65k over next 3 years....from your perspective its a pretty easy choice: Spent 50K or spend 35k...
This is the crucial thing that most miss: Because of this new depreciation scheme, miners don't care about net profit of their mining equipment. They only care about the offset to their tax bill....meaning its not spending 100K and hoping to earn some percentage over that. Its spending a 100k and earning just enough back to offset their tax bill, so maybe only earning back 65% is still "profitable" from a net tax perspective.
I look at bitcoin’s success in part in terms of demand for blockspace, which has to be its long-term incentive.
Blockspace is a whopping .5 sat/vbyte. At night that’s 500$ a block in fees or 3k usd per hour. 3k per hour is all there is, in the entire world, in terms of demand for blockspace and ultimately miner rewards.
How much hashrate will 3k per hour pay for? Or 72k per day?
That is not a success that tells me the network itself is on life support.
What’s going to change? More people ‘buying in’? Why should they? They don’t know anything about the network, they don’t hold their own keys, they don’t know Lightning exists, they have never heard of “cashu” or an “lsp”…
They just look at the exchange rate… and they might as well buy JPMorgan coin there is only ‘21 million’ of those and they’re ’backed’ by a bank (except you can never spend them or custody them yourself).