I'm kind of surprised that Lightning isn't used more for payments on sites like BitRefill. It works pretty seamlessly these days. Maybe it's because most major exchanges still don't support Lightning, and users simply haven't been exposed to it? I have no idea why else anyone would use Litecoin for this purpose in 2022.
Be that as it may, Lightning is still the fastest and cheapest payment method to my knowledge, while having very nice privacy properties to boot. Looking at l2fees.info I don't see anything in the Ethereum ecosystem that matches it as a tool for micropayments.
The reality is that the market demand for gambling on NFTs and other unregistered securities is simply much greater than using Bitcoin / "crypto" as an actual payments network. It's distasteful, but it is what it is.
Lightning is relatively difficult to use, especially non-custodially. Our easiest to use non-custodial wallet (Muun) stores funds on-chain. There's also a huge education gap - we still address Lightning as a separate thing from Bitcoin because it's non-trivial for one to swap Bitcoin on/off Lightning, and thus it's another thing to learn.
very nice privacy properties
Not for receivers - yet.
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