Lightning Network has Failed

The Lightning Network cannot scale Bitcoin to mass adoption. Payment channel technology, like Lightning, requires management via the L1. So that means users must make L1 transactions in order to manage their L2 channels. Therefore the L2 is bottlenecked by the L1. Therefore Lightning cannot actually handle global/mass adoption.

Not only that, Bitcoin itself cannot handle mass adoption. Even if it were only being used as "digital gold" (buy once and hold forever), it would still take 100 years(!) to onboard the world to the Bitcoin L1 — which is a pre-requisite to moving to the L2.

So the L1 is too slow to support its L2, and the L1 is too slow to handle mass adoption in any case. The current trajectory then is to "scale" Bitcoin via custodial services that offer users IOUs. These are banks! This is our current system! If this is the outcome then the whole project will have failed, because there's no way to stop these custodial services from engaging in fractional reserve and breaking the 21 million supply hardcap! No to mention other rent-seeking behavior.

Mint the NFT (available for 24 hours): https://zora.co/collect/zora:0x3dd184...

https://stacker.news/items/379225
https://blog.liquid.net/the-truth-abo...

Note: when criticizing Liquid as an 11-of-15 multi-sig, I should have pointed out that most Ethereum L2's are also functioning effectively as multi-sigs today! But the difference is that those systems have a clear, well established, path to complete decentralization — Liquid does not (as far as I know). The L2s have training wheels on them. If those training wheels don't come off then I'll be ripping into them as well.

0:00 - intro
0:34 - state channels
1:09 - why layers
2:28 - how lightning works
3:45 - opening & closing channels
6:21 - routing & capacity
8:31 - hubs
10:44 - liveness & storage requirements
12:59 - L2 is throttled by L1
16:53 - L1 is too slow for adoption
19:16 - custodial services (banks)
20:18 - breaking the 21M hardcap
25:27 - Liquid
26:50 - actual scaling solutions
28:48 - afterword