this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2025
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The comment you're responding to linked to a page giving statistics about the Lightning network. The number of channels peaked in 2022 and has been going down ever since then.
Number of channels is decreasing, but the money in each channel increased. In BTC terms the money decreased, but in real terms the money increased.
Real terms being 2022 dollar value
No it hasn't. Again, according to that link I provided, the total capacity of Lightning peaked in December 2024. These are not the graphs of a growing layer 2, it's been stagnant for many years.
Bitcoin simply wasn't designed for this sort of application, and Bitcoin's foundation layer is absolutely frozen due to the ideology of its users and developers so I don't expect the situation will improve. If you want to do a layer 2 then why not use a blockchain that's specifically designed to support it? If you use Ethereum you can even use token-wrapped Bitcoin as your medium of exchange. There's $14.4 billion dollars worth of WBTC on Ethereum available for exchange, as opposed to the $440 million worth in Lightning channels.
If bitcoin is worth more, you need to move fewer bitcoins to achieve the same result. If there USD value moved in lightning never increases then I would agree it's a failure
I was specifically speaking in USD terms, take a look at the page I linked above. It has graphs with both USD and Bitcoin on them. In Bitcoin terms Lightning's capacity peaked in early 2023. In dollar terms it was December 2024. The line is squiggly and has a general long-term upward trend overall on the net dollar capacity, but it really doesn't look very impressive compared to Ethereum's layer-2 architecture. And that's the only line where I see a long-term rise, the rest have been stagnant or declining for years.
I stand by my overall view that Bitcoin's technology is simply obsolete. It doesn't do anything, it just sits there being valuable because it's valuable. I don't think that's going to endure forever.