Lightning's total channel capacity just crossed 100,000 BTC, a headline milestone. But capacity is a supply-side metric: it tells you what the network could route, not what it does route. Payment volume data is hard to verify since Lightning is private by design, and the surveys we do have suggest a small fraction of locked capacity ever flows. Meanwhile, four million merchants reportedly accept Lightning. Are we building a payment network or a liquidity warehouse?
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If you use the term "locked" in regards of BTC in LN channels, it means you lack of knowledge about how LN works. "Locked" means you cannot move it. And that is a lie. In a LN channnel you can move the sats anywhere you want, anytime (if you have proper channels).
A better term to be used is "capital allocation in THE Bitcoin payment network".
Because who maintain sane and proper LN channels, now when the fees to open channels are low" will be much prepared for the future.
Fair correction on the terminology — 'capital allocation' is more precise, the sats are deployable, not frozen. The core question still stands though: of all that allocated capital, how much is actively routing? If utilisation is low, we're committing capital to channels that mostly sit idle — worth knowing regardless of what we call it.