Maybe I'm just being pedantic. Or maybe I'm missing the plot, but these are my biggest pet peeves when people talk about LN
#1 when people misspell "lightning"
I get that English might not be your best language, but ffs get the name right.
Lightning. Lightening. Lighting.
#2 when people say something difinitive about the activity on LN and link a tweet as "proof"
E.x. someone posts, "this node routed X BTC today" and link a tweet from the node operator.
Since when did we abondon the idea of "don't trust verify"?
It's impossible to prove that a node routed something so all we have to go on is claims (trust) from node operators.
We should really say, "this node CLAIMS TO HAVE routed X BTC."
#3 when people praise capacity growth as a universally good thing
E.x. LN is "growing" look at these capacity charts, this is great for LN!
Not necessarily...
I don't like it when people talk about capacity growth like it's a universally good thing. We need better metrics to guage the "health" of a network. Imagine if we thought living things were healthy as long as they continued to grow. We'd probably let many creatures die from cancerous tumors.
Let me explain....
Capacity in LN is not like Whirlpool capacity or L2 capacity on other blockchains. The funds in channels are not "pooled" into a single liquidity source. Channels on LN are not fungible. Some are more valuable (good at routing) than others.
Imagine a worst case scenario: a new LN node comes online from a popular "BTC influencer". They use their influence to get their followers to open massive channels to their node. Suppose they manage to add 1-2% more capacity to the network because of their marketing campaign.
Is this good for LN? Well, maybe it is, maybe it isn't.
What if I said this influencer had no intention of opening any channels of their own. Thus, 100% of their capacity is inbound and they have no ability to route or send payments. They also have no intention of using their node to receive.
All of this new capacity is therefore worthless. Not only that, but other nodes in the network will waste compute and network requests trying to route thru this node since they have no idea about the relative balances.
The network would be better off without this node and it's massive capacity.
Again, this is a worst case scenario where every channel on this node is detrimental. Most channels fall along a spectrum of utility ranging from routing multiple BTC per day, to being a net drain on the network's resources.
We need better metrics to guage health of the network. This is difficult due to having to trust nodes for their routing statistics (see #2).