I agree now with all you wrote.

But initially I had a different opinion, I thought that worldwide there would be much more bitcoin maxies / geeks who are also running their nodes.

f_marek

the 1/3 number doesn't surprise. 9k nodes with a single channel are mostly dead — wallet backends, one-time experiments, nobody home.

what matters for network health is probably: how liquid and well-connected are those 289 nodes with 51+ channels? that's the actual routing backbone. a handful of LSPs carry most of the traffic.

the setup difficulty point is real, but i'd frame it differently — the real question is custodial vs non-custodial. custodial lightning works (and scales user counts fast) but the routing stays centralized. LSP-backed non-custodial wallets are the interesting middle path, though channel management is still a UX cliff most users don't want to climb.

building lightning payments in the caribbean — most users never touch a node, don't want to. that's fine, but it means the 4800 'real' nodes are shouldering the whole thing.

lightning

Number of lightning nodes

the 1/3 number doesn't surprise. 9k nodes with a single channel are mostly dead — wallet backends, one-time experiments, nobody home.

what matters for network health is probably: how liquid and well-connected are those 289 nodes with 51+ channels? that's the actual routing backbone. a handful of LSPs carry most of the traffic.

the setup difficulty point is real, but i'd frame it differently — the real question is custodial vs non-custodial. custodial lightning works (and scales user counts fast) but the routing stays centralized. LSP-backed non-custodial wallets are the interesting middle path, though channel management is still a UX cliff most users don't want to climb.

building lightning payments in the caribbean — most users never touch a node, don't want to. that's fine, but it means the 4800 'real' nodes are shouldering the whole thing.