Being able to send and receive from anyone is growth, lightning isn't on the bitcoin chain until it gets synchronized.
If I give you a bitcoin address, you can't send anything to me with the lightning network.
It's unnecessary nonsense because bitcoin is pointlessly crippled. Every other cryptocurrency has plenty of throughput and can be used decentralized.
That is literally the purpose of building second layers. We don't need to keep on-chain records of every microtransaction and coffee purchase in an immutable, ever-growing blockchain synchronized across thousands of nodes across the globe.
> If I give you a bitcoin address, you can't send anything to me with the lightning network.
Sure I can. It is called a submarine swap.
You can call it whatever you want, someone still has to sync with the main chain, where all the utility is. You can get together with your friend and give each other IOUs all day every day, it doesn't somehow change the fact that bitcoin's throughput is severely crippled to be the speed of a dialup modem.
Have you ever stopped to think that other cryptocurrencies don't have second layers because people don't want them and their chains don't need them? Why go through all this when there is no reason to have a crippled chain in the first place?
Using regular cryptocurrencies is incredibly simple and elegant. It's only when people started to believe propaganda about disk space and cpu time (that never made sense with the most basic examination) that somehow something that worked amazingly well is now a complete mess.
After people realised that this is a crap idea, they have reinvented banks, who take people's BTC and give them IOUs instead. Then only banks have to deal with the "channels" and "locked" tokens in a centralised way, lessening the overall complexity.
Few understand :)
The general story is that not all transactions are equal. A payment from your cousin for a poker debt doesn't need the fury of a million computers protecting it. Similarly if you have an ongoing relationship with a vendor, and many other examples. In real-life there are vastly differing trust-profiles between transactions. It's ok to trade some security for some efficiency sometimes. It doesn't make sense to treat them all the same.
[1] https://www.cardrates.com/advice/number-of-credit-card-trans...
This is why I can’t get Bitcoiners - their assumptions are always over the top “we will take 100% of gold’s value” “nations will dissolve because of Bitcoin” or something of that order.
Compare that to ETH - people will build decentralised applications and ETH will be the currency in those applications. Stakers get a fee.
Simple.
Bitcoin Cash (the og big block chain) is alive and kicking, and getting stable updates (both features and performance), and also has optional (affordable) coin shuffle). Lightning Network is a security and usability nightmare, and its total liquidity is in the low thousands of BTC (lol).
In comparison, BCH has lost 80% of its transaction volume in the last year alone. Its blocksize is now 100KB on average and it now processes fewer transactions than LN. It also regularly hard-forks, either because of leadership cults (Ver, Wright, Sechet, ...) or because of scheduled hard-forks every 6 months which kick off all users who haven't updated. It's the opposite of stable and the market apparently does not share its determination in sacrificing decentralization for adoption.
