Tuscany Lightning Summit featured developers and companies actively working on the Bitcoin layer-2: the discussion about the state of the Lightning Network.
During the last day of the Tuscany Lightning Summit in Viareggio, the current state of the Lightning Network was discussed. During the panel “State of Lightning,” Roy Sheinfeld, CEO of Breez, Ryan Gentry, Business Developer at Lightning Labs, Steve Lee, Lead at Spiral, John Carvalho, CEO of Synonym, and Bastien Teinturier, CTO of Acinq, analyzed the main Bitcoin layer-2.
“I think we got to the point where there’s no chance that Lightning could go away.” the words spoken by Roy Sheinfeld.
The debate began with the panel moderator Roy Sheinfeld emphasizing how the Lightning network has significantly improved since the first Lightning conference held in 2019. Steve Lee shared the CEO of Breez’s vision, highlighting the network’s improvements, albeit arriving more slowly than one might expect:
“Today, Lightning is absolutely better than last year and the year before that.”
Among the current most interesting use cases of Lightning, Steve Lee focused on Stacker.News. Stacker.News is a news, analysis, and insights website related to Bitcoin. It is a content-sharing forum that allows creators to share their work and receive direct support in Bitcoin. During the panel, Steve Lee stated:
“I actually think Stacker.news is quite compelling, it’s my favourite bitcoin app. I think it could become like a Reddit killer because of Bitcoin.”
Bastien Teinturier spoke about the evolution of Phoenix, highlighting the improvements of the wallet compared to 2019. He also emphasized that in 2019, to use the Lightning Network, a person needed to have a general understanding of Bitcoin and Lightning, while today there are several wallets that offer a good UX, allowing even non-expert users to use the Lightning Network without having a complete understanding of Bitcoin or Lightning.
Lightning and mass adoption
Is Lightning ready for mass adoption?
According to John Carvalho, Bitcoin cannot handle mass adoption, and neither can Lightning, arguing that currently, no one knows how to scale the protocol to handle billions of users.
Similarly, according to Bastian Teinturier, there are several intrinsic tradeoffs to the protocol that make some things more challenging than a centralized system like Visa. Teinturier also emphasized the importance of being honest and transparent about the compromises and limitations of the Lightning network, avoiding false promises and dishonest marketing typical of the altcoin world.
Management of a Lightning node
The panel could not miss the debate on the current difficulty in running and operating a Lightning node. On the issue, the CEO of Breez stated:
“I never had that vision of everyone running their lightning node in their home because it’s not even a hardware problem, it’s a software problem, it’s inherit to LN that you need to be professional in order to run a LN node, so I’m happy with the fact that we kind of gave up on the idea of everyone running routing node and I’m happy that we have a more professional managed LN nodes.“
John Carvalho commented:
“I’m happy about those things too, but I think that you still need to be anybody could do it.”
Future developments
In conclusion of the panel, Sheinfeld asked what future improvements to focus on for the Lightning Network.
According to Steve Lee, one of the fundamental aspects is to maintain privacy properties:
“I work on Bitcoin to preserve properties from cash in the digital world. I worry about LSPs being choke points. We don’t want just a dozen global LSPs, we want thousands, ten of thousands, hundred of thousands of LSPs.”
John Carvalho added:
“Anything that improves user experience and removes complexity for the user is going to give LN a better chance and anything that provides reliability from the LSP and provider level is going to give ln a better chance to succeed.”
For Bastian Teinturier, a fundamental aspect to focus on in the coming years is liquidity management and allocation, which allows for a more efficient network, improving the success of Lightning payments.
In recent months, there have been several criticisms surrounding the Lightning Network. In most cases, these criticisms stem from two factors:
- disillusionment for those who had overestimated LN’s capabilities, considering it as a panacea for scalability without trade-offs;
- the emergence of various alternative layer-2 solutions, indicating a tendency to create new protocols rather than perfecting the current reference layer-2.
Regarding the adoption of the Lightning Network, on April 3rd, Coinbase announced a partnership with the company Lightspark to integrate the Lightning Network into their exchange.
