What do you believe is holding the lightning network back? \ stacker news ~bitcoin

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What do you believe is holding the lightning network back?

2510 sats \ 16 comments \ @Jestopher_WOS 18 Sep 2023 bitcoin

8524 sats \ 2 replies \ @supertestnet 18 Sep 2023

Too frustrating

The "complex" solutions like btcpay have a huge learning curve or require hiring someone to do it for you

The "simple" solutions make you pay an LSP or a custodian, and the LSP models can't prevent or hide force closures. The moment one happens, merchants will probably notice a fee -- especially if the wallet tries to fix it for them -- or, if not, the merchant must make a frustrating choice: either learn how to fix it (they definitely don't want to learn yet another thing) or take it as a loss i.e. leave it unfixed and leave the money stuck in a base layer address that the merchant doesn't know how to use

Both options (complex and simple) distinguish between "lightning" and "bitcoin." Merchants don't know the difference so they must do one of two things: learn the difference or ignore the difference. Having to make this choice is frustrating, and if they choose to learn the difference, that is also frustrating, because merchants don't want to learn yet another new thing.

Whether or not the merchant learns what lightning is, some customers will click the bitcoin option. If the merchant did not learn the difference between the two in the beginning, or forgot the difference, he will suddenly discover that, because the customer chose bitcoin, he has to wait an unknown number of minutes, and, because he didn't learn the difference, he also won't understand what's going on while he's waiting.

Even when customers select the lightning option, the merchant will discover that, contrary to the marketing, lightning is very often slow. If the sender is not using one of the popular wallets (which are mostly custodial), their lightning payment may regularly take a whole minute or more before their wallet says it either worked or it couldn't find a route. Merchants hate waiting 60 seconds or more to even learn what the problem is. After about 10 seconds of waiting they start asking the customer to consider paying some other way. But if the customer chose lightning, they can't, because their first payment hasn't failed yet. It might succeed or fail at any second, but in the meantime you just have to wait, and there is no transparency as to what is going on or when you might get a message.

If the payment fails, it's pretty bad: maybe the merchant loses that sale. Maybe the customer pays with fiat instead. Maybe he falls back on a base layer payment and we're in for an even longer wait. Whatever happens, the merchant learns that bitcoin payments aren't very reliable (even though it's actually lightning's fault, not bitcoin's) so he won't want to let customers pay with lightning OR bitcoin when there's a line. And he also won't want to set up a special "bitcoin queue" for bitcoiners only, so he will be inclined to just stop accepting bitcoin altogether until it gets more reliable.

Here's another frustration: after that one bitcoiner finally nags the merchant into accepting bitcoin payments, he will likely have a total of one customer who actually uses it. Reminder: most people don't have bitcoin, and most bitcoiners prefer not to pay in bitcoin, for many reasons. It's either too expensive on the base layer, too unreliable on lightning, too much of a tax burden, and/or maybe they don't understand why anyone would ever spend their hard money (bitcoin) when they can spend their inflationary money (fiat) instead.

So the merchant finds himself with a payment method that (1) he doesn't understand, (2) it doesn't work very well, and (3) it is only requested by one guy. You'll forgive him if he forgets to train his next staff member how to accept your bitcoin payment. And the next one, and the next one, til the staff forgets they even accept it and no one remembers where the bitcoin tablet is anyway or what its password is.

Lightning (and even the base layer) are just too frustrating right now. I don't blame merchants for avoiding it -- I'm surprised any of them accept it at all

93 sats \ 0 replies \ @DarthCoin 18 Sep 2023

Very good answer! I will add just this: Bitcoin is a natural selection. Not for the weak... Only for brave.

1100 sats \ 0 replies \ @clr 18 Sep 2023

Excellent answer; very comprehensive analysis.

Let me add some perspective. Around thirty years ago, when I was a kid, my parents had a commerce and credit card payments had to be processed manually. The process took 5 to 10 minutes for each sale and it involved the following steps:

Check whether the credit card provided by the customer was in the blacklist. The blacklist was a booklet that was updated every 3 months or so by the banks. If it was in the blacklist, the card would have to be taken from the customer, cut in half and sent to the bank association, and they would give a reward for this.
If the sale was over a certain amount, authorization was needed. This meant calling the bank association, telling them over the phone the credit card details, merchant details and amount to be authorized. If successful, they would provide an authorization number that had to be written down on the payment slip.
Fill in the payment slip by hand with the authorization number, the amount and date and time. The payment slip had original and two carbon copies: original for the bank, one copy for the customer and another for the merchant.
Put the slip on a machine with a roll that would imprint the embossed card data and merchant data onto the payment slip. If you wonder why many cards still have embossed information, this is the reason, legacy compatibility.
Give the payment slip to the customer to sign.
Detach the copies and the carbon sheets and give the customer his copy.
In order to get paid, the merchant would have to put together all the payment slips into an special envelope, write the total amount and send it to the bank for processing.

Then, around 1990, the banks started providing electronic POS to small merchants (until then, it was only for large merchants and chains). It would still take >30 seconds (dialing, negotiating connection and processing the transaction itself) and transactions would fail maybe 1 out of 8 times in the beginning. If the phone line was busy with a phone call, it couldn't be used for payments. Still had to keep the paper forms as a backup for several years.

The point is that none of those inconveniences stopped merchants from accepting credit cards back then, let alone nowadays. Credit cards were accepted because customers (especially tourists) wanted it and not accepting cards meant losing sales.

I think part of the onus is on us bitcoiners to favor those merchants who accept bitcoin and stop with all this Gresham's law nonsense. If you are a bitcoiner, you probably shouldn't have fiat to spend in the first place. We have to make merchants understand that not accepting bitcoin means losing business to those who do accept it. Yes, it's too early and all that, but that's the direction we should go.

This is also an opportunity for entrepreneurial bitcoiners to provide payment processing services. Yes, most merchants won't want to deal with BTCPay, opening channels and maintaining a LN node, etc., and that's understandable.

126 sats \ 4 replies \ @purpurato 18 Sep 2023

Managing liquidity is quite hard and the channels force closing, those are the biggest problems imho.

40 sats \ 0 replies \ @aoeu 18 Sep 2023

I agree for sure about channels force closing. Doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason about it. I found managing liquidity to be less of an issue given that with enough channels, they seem to balance themselves pretty well.

1 sat \ 2 replies \ @Jestopher_WOS OP 18 Sep 2023

We built Hydro to help with this to make the management burden disappear. It should just be a subscription now.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @aoeu 18 Sep 2023

How does Hydro help channels force closing? Seems to be issues with Tor in my experience.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Jestopher_WOS OP 18 Sep 2023

It wouldn't need prevent force closes, but would help with ensuring enough liquidity to sustain business operations.

111 sats \ 0 replies \ @TheBTCManual 18 Sep 2023

Like supertestnet it's frustrating to manage, and it can be costly if you F it up, your node is a single point of failure, if it goes down and you're not at home, what then? Running it non-custodially is a burden to the average person when compared to on-chain or custodial services

80 sats \ 3 replies \ @Ksjznxnxkxksn 18 Sep 2023

Inbound liquidity

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @Jestopher_WOS OP 18 Sep 2023

What about it?

70 sats \ 1 reply \ @Ksjznxnxkxksn 18 Sep 2023

How do you explain to newbs that, "well in order to use LN you need to open channel or buy inbound"

Second scenario you just point them towards custodial option like WoS or ZBD, if company behind them rugged your peers, they will plant seed on their head that "Bitcoin is scam, i will never use it"

Remember that the one needed LN the most are 3rdworlders and every penny matters a lot for them

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Jestopher_WOS OP 18 Sep 2023

Kind of like credit cards on the Visa Network, you have to join the Lightning Network and pay dues to your connectors to accept lightning payments.

30 sats \ 0 replies \ @faithandcredit 18 Sep 2023

Confidence in Bitcoin as a whole. Its just a meme coin to 99% of ppl :) and maybe thats what it is

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @fm 18 Sep 2023

liquidity push to centralized platforms, and that is the biggest barrier IMO

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nullcount 18 Sep 2023

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