+100 sats. Agree that there should be more focus on use cases rather than only on wallets.

In my experience the difficult thing isn't development, but finding users. Bitcoin (on-chain and Lightning) is accepted in my marketplace project Bitejo.com but it's difficult to find people who actually want to use the marketplace.

I guess it would be easier if a dev of an already popular app/business/marketplace would integrate KYC-free Bitcoin payments, but you would need to convince them somehow to do it...

Well said @roy. Just some LN wallets are not enough for adoption if there's no utility. Very good article!

So, why there is still no p2p NFC transfer option between two LN wallets?

Such approach for example in the small shops in El Salvador would be manifestly better than the old thing i.e. hassle of scanning QR codes.

Of course with the same precaution like in plain NFC payments - smartphone of payer must be unlocked and additionally with confirmation pop-up window in LN wallet with the amount in sats/usd and OK/Reject buttons.

Please do it @roy in Breez! :)

Absolutely great article. This the way. We will never convince the masses to use bitcoin by ideology. Utility is the way.

Bang on.

good article, it got me thinking!

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it's a bit of chicken and egg problem. users won't use lightning without "apps with lightning". but app developers won't integrate lightning into their apps unless it's something users want. so the utility has to be clear to users, and the ux has to be better than fiat. that brings me to my next point...

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what's the onboarding story for an app that integrates breez sdk? do users of the app already need a lightning wallet? and/or will the users need to create a new wallet, back up a seed phrase, figure out how to buy bitcoin and transfer it into the app (which may involve a whole other separate user journey), etc? imo onboarding and key management are critical to get right to cross the chasm from highly motivated ideological bitcoiners to "mainstream" users who have a Job To Be Done and bitcoin/lightning just happens to be the best tool for the job. if the ux is subpar compared to fiat, developers are just going to go with fiat.

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I think the developer-first approach is directionally correct. of course it's important to have wallet software, but once we have that, the next important step is distribution. and using third-party applications as the distribution channel makes a lot of sense. paypal became successful because of its integrations with applications (crucially, ebay to start). I think bitcoin/LN for payments will succeed similarly. at a high level there are two paths you could take here: integrating with existing applications (which involves BD/marketing to existing merchants and product dev teams) and integrating with new applications (which involves capturing mindshare of product teams/devs who are at the beginning of their product building journey). since your article seems to be mostly about the latter I'll focus here.

It may be instructive to see how other developer-oriented technologies that we see everywhere took root. take google analytics for example. as an anti-privacy tool, I don't like it, but it is everywhere so it's at least worth thinking about how they were able to achieve that scale and take some lessons from that. part of it was partnerships with website building companies. "hey website builder, your clients want to track their website performance? use google analytics". part of it was partnerships with online marketing classes. "hey marketer, want to track your impressions and clicks? use google analytics" ... which led the marketers to either plug it into the stack themselves or ask a dev on their team to do it for them. part of it was developer training. "ok and on step 3 of How To Build Your First App we're going to add in some analytics so we can track user metrics, let's integrate google analytics." these distribution channels got GA in front of many many people for whom GA solved a problem, and successful conversions through those channels over many years compounded to the point where GA is now nearly ubiquitous.

with a similar strategy of getting bitcoin/LN in front of many developers (or entrepreneurs) who need a payment solution, maybe we can get bitcoin/LN payments to be a ubiquitous part of the payments stack. and maybe we don't even need the application to use bitcoin/LN exclusively for payments, maybe bitcoin/LN is just one option alongside fiat (stripe, square, paypal, where you at?). but bitcoin/LN is the option that should be promoted to users for whom bitcoin/LN uniquely solves a problem, whether that's no KYC (depending on the onramp used), or privacy (ish), or micropayments, or no chargebacks, or censorship-resistance, or global accessibility, etc.

I agree with most points! Great article @roy

@roy this is brilliant. I think this is what makes apps like stacker news, wavlake, fountain bit refill and breez so special. They make Lightning fun! I have like 15 lightning wallets but I wouldn't use any of them if there weren't fun apps to use them with!

Wow, man! Nice write-up. I feel a bit motivated while reading this to start working on one of my year-old project that I made for a hackathon: https://github.com/aniketambore/Bits-and-Sats

The author of the article is clear that an essential element for the expansive growth of the use of Bitcoin through the Lightning network is to enhance usability (not only in native applications but also by incorporating it into other already established applications).

No spam apps

Lightning is a technology that enables fast, proportionally priced bitcoin payments and is programmable, peer-to-peer money. However, most apps that use Lightning are just payment apps or wallets. The mobile internet has allowed people to disintermediate a lot of their interpersonal economic interaction, so why do we still have all these payment intermediaries? Lightning can-do P2P payments, but where are the next orders of utility magnitude going to come from? Connections are the key to utility, and developers are the key to connections. The key to scaling Lightning further is connecting it to other technologies, and developers are the ones who will be doing the connecting. The Breez SDK is an end-to-end, non-custodial, drop-in solution that lets a developer integrate Lightning into an app in a few hours without having to pay fees to third-party payment processors or become a payment processor themselves.

Solution: #178838

Podcasting 2.0, fountain.fm app is a great use case.

Someone make a version of Honeygain or Pawns.app that pays out sats.

Hell yeah. Let's go.