Routing for free can be sustainable and might just be how the network evolves over time. Instead of the customer paying for being able to pay, the seller is paying for being able to receive a payment. This is especially easy to sell, since sellers are already used to being charged for payments and it will increase adoption a lot if paying on lightning was free.
Yep, as a payment provider I can tell you my customers (merchants) are super impressed when they see that 0 sat fee in their customer’s wallets. They are super price sensitive. Last time we tried with on-chain transactions we got very negative feedback when the tx fee rate spiked
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This is my impression as well.
I want to push lightning adoption as far out as we can.
Two factors (besides merchant adoption) are critical for this in my opinion:
  • fast (like in < 1s fast)
  • cheap (ideally free) payments.
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