Zenul_Abidin on Nostr: State of Lightning Network in 2024 In this post, I will examining the state of LN ...
State of Lightning Network in 2024
In this post, I will examining the state of LN from a user's perspective - not a developer's or a business' - and go over a few areas where we can improve. By doing so, I hope to shed some light on how suitable LN is for different types of people.
So I'm going to assume everyone reading this has at least a *basic* understanding of LN, and in particular, local and remote balances, wallet and channel balances, and so on. If not then lightning.engineering is a good resource to get up to speed.
1. What do we have now?
Currently, you can go to any service that utilizes lightning, such as Nostr or this website, and make a deposit to spend your sats as you please. Or alternatively, some websites (like Nostr) let you make a direct payment using a LNURL or invoice.
There are also apps that you can run on your mobile device which specifically create a Lightning wallet for you and abstract all the details. Strike, Wallet of Satoshi, and the new Mutiny app all fall into this category. These kinds of apps generally have a way to fund your wallet either through an on-chain payment, card transaction, or both. Some of these allow you to sell LNBTC like that too.
There are other wallets like Muun that give you a Lightning wallet but take care of that via submarine swaps instead of running your own channel.
Generally, you can receive LNBTC with a few size restrictions. Sending LNBTC assuming your LN balance is above the reserve should be simple as well. Through the mechanics of channel rebalancing there should rarely, if ever, be a problem with payment routing under normal circumstances.
Mainstream crypto payment processors have been very slow to adopt Lightning Network as a payment method. I think CoinGate and one or two other services have it and that's it. BTCPayServer continues to have excellent support for Lightning.
Similarly, exchanges have also been very slow to adopt LN. This goes for CEX and DEX alike. I think Kraken supports it and I heard Binance making an announcement some time ago that they would implement it. But most exchanges still do not support it. That doesn't really surprise me to be honest, because there are some dinosaurs among them that still cannot process Segwit transactions.
Adoption of Lightning Network is very strong in some parts of the world where mobile phone penetration is high and currency confidence is very low.
There are two main use cases for using the Lightning Network where it obviously is better than most of the alternatives:
- Microtransactions, assuming the wallet's balance is large enough
- Payments in third-world countries where people have small dollar amounts.
2. What can we improve?
First of all, while Lightning Network can send very small payments just fine, it does not work very well with tiny balances (local balances specifically). Channel reserves prevent sending anything when the balance is less tan that amount. And considering how Bitcoin itself is getting higher and higher prices, The reserve can be quite high for somebody in a third-world country. This creates two problems:
- The inability to actually buy anything, as I mentioned above, and
- The inability to send your money to another wallet or app.
While the process of closing a Lightning channel should send your LNBTC back to your on-chain balance, sending this BTC anywhere is not feasible when there are higher transaction fees (relative to satoshis, not USD). That means the wallet providers who actually operate your wallet will lose money when you sell such small amounts and so usually restrict withdrawals to larger amount of sats. It effectively locks small-balance holders to one wallet app.
Because of all this it is very hard, if not impossible, to convert small amounts of BTC to LNBTC (but not vice versa). And by extension, converting anything to LNBTC, since other payment methods ultimately need to use the money to buy on-chain bitcoin that gets swapped for LNBTC.
At the other side of the spectrum, we have very large balances, amounts for which people consider storing in a hardware wallet during other circumstances. Prior to Wumbo, LN wasn't really equipped to handle these large channel sizes, but now that it is, it makes the security issues more important.
Hackers are motivated to steal large amounts of anything, so the larger the LN balance, the more determined they become to break and exploit LN flaws. And we have seen recently, Lightning Network has its own set of vulnerabilities (not to mention the clients themselves) which would allow for people to steal the balance in your side of the channel. We have already seen sad stories of people losing lots of BTC in such a way over here.
For this reason, people do not recommend storing very large balances of bitcoin on the lightning network. Although, this problem is less serious, because when you have a large amount of BTC then the on-chain transaction fee will never be a problem.
Third is more of a regulatory issue. Sanctions that stop people from the rest of the financial system should not affect the Lightning Network. That is because most of these countries have a population that arguably needs it the most. Cuba. Venezuela. Afghanistan. Sudan. Heck, even NK, as Bitcoin was intended to be a worldwide currency from the onset.
These people are going to have great trouble finding a Lightning wallet to use as many of them are blocked, and the ones that don't, require a high balance to start with, because of the fee issue.
Fourth, many people still don't understand how to use LN. More documentation in this area is required.
Finally, there are almost no desktop wallets for Lightning Network that aren't browser extensions or are not built-in to the node itself like LND. In my opinion there is really no logical reason for it to remain like this.
3. Conclusion
- Lightning Network needs more developers before it can get more users. Additional wallets, and efficient ways to create tiny channels, need to be made.
- LN apps desperately need to be hardened to the standards of Bitcoin applications such as Core, Electrum, Sparrow, and Wasabi.
- LN needs more teachers to ELI5 creating a wallet and getting a balance.
- More payment gateways and exchanges need to support LN.
- Lightning Network financial infrastructure needs to be made sanction-proof.
That's all folks. Hopefully the wall of text was not obnoxious. Let me know how you feel about these things down below.
In this post, I will examining the state of LN from a user's perspective - not a developer's or a business' - and go over a few areas where we can improve. By doing so, I hope to shed some light on how suitable LN is for different types of people.
So I'm going to assume everyone reading this has at least a *basic* understanding of LN, and in particular, local and remote balances, wallet and channel balances, and so on. If not then lightning.engineering is a good resource to get up to speed.
1. What do we have now?
Currently, you can go to any service that utilizes lightning, such as Nostr or this website, and make a deposit to spend your sats as you please. Or alternatively, some websites (like Nostr) let you make a direct payment using a LNURL or invoice.
There are also apps that you can run on your mobile device which specifically create a Lightning wallet for you and abstract all the details. Strike, Wallet of Satoshi, and the new Mutiny app all fall into this category. These kinds of apps generally have a way to fund your wallet either through an on-chain payment, card transaction, or both. Some of these allow you to sell LNBTC like that too.
There are other wallets like Muun that give you a Lightning wallet but take care of that via submarine swaps instead of running your own channel.
Generally, you can receive LNBTC with a few size restrictions. Sending LNBTC assuming your LN balance is above the reserve should be simple as well. Through the mechanics of channel rebalancing there should rarely, if ever, be a problem with payment routing under normal circumstances.
Mainstream crypto payment processors have been very slow to adopt Lightning Network as a payment method. I think CoinGate and one or two other services have it and that's it. BTCPayServer continues to have excellent support for Lightning.
Similarly, exchanges have also been very slow to adopt LN. This goes for CEX and DEX alike. I think Kraken supports it and I heard Binance making an announcement some time ago that they would implement it. But most exchanges still do not support it. That doesn't really surprise me to be honest, because there are some dinosaurs among them that still cannot process Segwit transactions.
Adoption of Lightning Network is very strong in some parts of the world where mobile phone penetration is high and currency confidence is very low.
There are two main use cases for using the Lightning Network where it obviously is better than most of the alternatives:
- Microtransactions, assuming the wallet's balance is large enough
- Payments in third-world countries where people have small dollar amounts.
2. What can we improve?
First of all, while Lightning Network can send very small payments just fine, it does not work very well with tiny balances (local balances specifically). Channel reserves prevent sending anything when the balance is less tan that amount. And considering how Bitcoin itself is getting higher and higher prices, The reserve can be quite high for somebody in a third-world country. This creates two problems:
- The inability to actually buy anything, as I mentioned above, and
- The inability to send your money to another wallet or app.
While the process of closing a Lightning channel should send your LNBTC back to your on-chain balance, sending this BTC anywhere is not feasible when there are higher transaction fees (relative to satoshis, not USD). That means the wallet providers who actually operate your wallet will lose money when you sell such small amounts and so usually restrict withdrawals to larger amount of sats. It effectively locks small-balance holders to one wallet app.
Because of all this it is very hard, if not impossible, to convert small amounts of BTC to LNBTC (but not vice versa). And by extension, converting anything to LNBTC, since other payment methods ultimately need to use the money to buy on-chain bitcoin that gets swapped for LNBTC.
At the other side of the spectrum, we have very large balances, amounts for which people consider storing in a hardware wallet during other circumstances. Prior to Wumbo, LN wasn't really equipped to handle these large channel sizes, but now that it is, it makes the security issues more important.
Hackers are motivated to steal large amounts of anything, so the larger the LN balance, the more determined they become to break and exploit LN flaws. And we have seen recently, Lightning Network has its own set of vulnerabilities (not to mention the clients themselves) which would allow for people to steal the balance in your side of the channel. We have already seen sad stories of people losing lots of BTC in such a way over here.
For this reason, people do not recommend storing very large balances of bitcoin on the lightning network. Although, this problem is less serious, because when you have a large amount of BTC then the on-chain transaction fee will never be a problem.
Third is more of a regulatory issue. Sanctions that stop people from the rest of the financial system should not affect the Lightning Network. That is because most of these countries have a population that arguably needs it the most. Cuba. Venezuela. Afghanistan. Sudan. Heck, even NK, as Bitcoin was intended to be a worldwide currency from the onset.
These people are going to have great trouble finding a Lightning wallet to use as many of them are blocked, and the ones that don't, require a high balance to start with, because of the fee issue.
Fourth, many people still don't understand how to use LN. More documentation in this area is required.
Finally, there are almost no desktop wallets for Lightning Network that aren't browser extensions or are not built-in to the node itself like LND. In my opinion there is really no logical reason for it to remain like this.
3. Conclusion
- Lightning Network needs more developers before it can get more users. Additional wallets, and efficient ways to create tiny channels, need to be made.
- LN apps desperately need to be hardened to the standards of Bitcoin applications such as Core, Electrum, Sparrow, and Wasabi.
- LN needs more teachers to ELI5 creating a wallet and getting a balance.
- More payment gateways and exchanges need to support LN.
- Lightning Network financial infrastructure needs to be made sanction-proof.
That's all folks. Hopefully the wall of text was not obnoxious. Let me know how you feel about these things down below.