So, I first came upon the concept when I was installing Aqua wallet, but do not see it used much anywhere else. Even the handful of websites (Bitrefill, Travala) that acccept BTC as a mean of payment do not really mention L-BTC anywhere and it does not get any coverage.
Is the project more or less dead, and totally overshadowed by Lightning? In particular, I would be curious to know what are its relative merits/demerits against lightning, in terms of transaction convenience, fungibility of Sats, anonymity, privacy and trust model?
In case I am receiving payments from someone else, is there a point where I should choose Liquid BTC over Lightning?
Look at https://breez.technology that uses L-BTC as back-end
It was never really alive in the first place.
Liquid peg-in/peg-out is a great privacy tool for de-correlating UTXOs. For paying LN invoices, it's slow (must wait 2 Liquid block confs before payment is released) and inflexible (min 1000 sat invoice balance - Aqua refused to pay for this comment and I had to use another LN wallet).
I don't think its dead, but perhaps use cases are limited. I for one use it for peerswaps (https://www.peerswap.dev/) and I recently realized that Bull Bitcoin supports it. :)
Was it ever alive?
Kidding, it does seem to have more TX since there have been some wallets like Aqua using it to swap with LN. Still a long way to go IMO
You can check out the Liquid block explorer its' pretty much a ghost town. If you have a lightning channel set up you're pretty much good when the high fee times come around
Some wallets are using Liquid to do lightning swaps into liquid on the fly via Boltz exchange like Marina wallet etc so that sometimes fills blocks
You can rebalance channels with liquid too if on-chain fees is high
Liquid's main use was arbing between exchanges, but few support them
It was popular when ordinals made on-chain transaction fees spike and lightning custodial solutions were charging high fees to transact cuz expensive to open channels
As long as Blockstream is a company then liquid will exist
the less one puts in the work of studying mainchain Bitcoin and lightning (LND in particular), the further behind they shall fall;
i think that LN and BTC are actually a good model of how the collective mind behaves when grounded in reality (math and energy in this case); in other words, it is a model for studying the Self; Bruce Lee studied the self thru a physical combative artform, Pythagoras thru math and geometry, Usain Bolt thru athletic performance, mushroom scientists thru the study of the mycelial networks, etc.;
L-BTC was a fun project, and it's going obsolete;