It's been 6+ years of struggle to get LN anywhere beyond a community of mostly ideological users with no visible success or perspective. My opinion is ultimately LN is not what market at large wants from Bitcoin and folks should look into other directions besides dumb payments, and not overly fixate on LN.
I personally don't think LN is done, and in fact, I think it's a great success already, though perhaps it isn't (and won't be) the kind of success that people were originally hoping for. And that's the interesting point, which the quote above illustrates: it's hard to know what the world will want and use.
If btc doesn't die out entirely (and I don't think it will) then I have strong conviction that the ways in which it's actually used in a decade will surprise the hell out of people now. That's not a shortcoming in lightning or in anything else. It's the complexity of the world.
I don't think it's done either.
I think people got into a "Mission Accomplished" mindset last bull run and thought scaling bitcoin via lightning was easier than it is. Reality didn't meet their expectations so they're blaming reality when they should instead adjust their expectations.
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I like how you put it.
Sadly, the "reality doesn't meet my expectations, so I will blame reality" mindset seems to be endemic. It's a feature of human-kind and I should learn to hate it less.
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