Zap Observer lists 1900 zaps on nostr in the last 24 hours.
SN has 1300 zaps in the last 24 hours.
Then there's all the payment activity at merchants and all the p2p stuff, which is pretty hard to measure.
What's your gut instinct?
~100018.5%
~10,00048.1%
~100,00022.2%
~1,000,00011.1%
27 votes \ 13h left
hm... define the word "use" here?
Because plenty of people have/hold/keep balances on Lightning for potential spending (what ~econ calls precautionary demand for money balances), that means a lot more than people spending on a given day.
Basically: holding money is a use case
Similarly, what if you have a routing node but aren't spending or you have a Square terminal accepting lightning payments that automatically convert to fiat?
My guess is that most of the lightning users are people passively receiving mining rewards over lightning.
use = send a payment
yeah, that's not a very good/narrow/correct use(!) of the word use.
Then the number is tiny, but mostly irrelevant
Says the Icelandic welfare beneficiary who can't be fucked actually attaching a sending wallet here on SNs because he's only here to take, not give.
Nice question, and thank you for asking...
I would say, zaps are only part of the picture. The real measure of Bitcoin adoption via LN is everyday economic activity through merchants. P2P payments matter too, but merchant payments show whether Bitcoin is becoming actual money in people’s daily lives.
I said 1M due to all the stuff we can’t see because it’s private
Absolutely.
zaps aren’t the only thing that can be considered use. I personally at least know a 10k people using LN. I assume it’s just a fraction as even all the big exchanges have it there now so why would people deposit 100k…1000k sats onchain..
so it very well can be more than a million. Alone Binannce has more than 300million users.
I voted 10,000. Worldwide I gotta think there are a lot of quiet uses we just don't see.
I guess 10,000 too. I wouldn't guess any more than that though
I sometimes zap 100+ times a day- using coinos wallet here on SNs.
So I am sometimes 100th of global use?
If so shows just how fucking big talk no walk most Bitcoiners are!
@denlillaapan never uses sats- only takes them from others.
@denlillaapan can't be bothered attaching a send wallet because he only wants to take, not give.
I think the number is somewhere between 1k and 10k. Also, "on a daily basis" is a little confusing. there might be a lot of people who use lightning once a week.
The number of people who have ever signed up on SN and double it because half are still out there struggle bragging on Bitcoin twitter or r/reddit.
I know more than 10000 lightning users personally
All those saying less than a 100k are absolute retards ;)
In 2023 river estimated up to 1.1M MAU. I just divided it to 30.
🫶🫶✌️✌️🤘🤟
The definition question raised in the comments is really the whole ballgame here. If "use" means "sent a payment today," the observable data (zaps on nostr + SN) points to the low thousands — but that's a lower bound with a huge blind spot: custodial wallets (Wallet of Satoshi, Cash App, exchange off-ramps) settle most user activity internally, so the public network only sees a fraction of actual spending.
River's 2023 estimate of ~1.1M monthly active users is probably the best anchor. Daily actives for a payments product are typically a fraction of monthly — maybe 5-15% — which would land somewhere in the tens of thousands of actual senders per day. That squares with the ~10,000 poll option being the popular pick.
But honestly the more interesting number is the precautionary-holdings one: people keeping Lightning balances ready to spend are "using" Lightning as money even on days they don't transact. That group is plausibly an order of magnitude larger than the daily senders, and it's the one that actually matters for adoption.