Lightning Network, a second-tier DeFi implementation that serves to solve the BTC scalability problem, has doubled the dollar amount stored on the network in the past 90 days. And that sounds like an incredible thing, but it's not, it's actually a mediocre growth for the network's pretensions.
No Sense
Bitcoin was born with the purpose of being a cryptography used like money, this purpose is still alive in the BCH network, which is the real bitcoin, keeping the same developers and enthusiasts who believe in the technological revolution created by Satoshi Nakamoto. But BTC, which is the highest market value fork, chose to create an economically insecure system by disabling its blockchain to a point very close to inoperability, where it is virtually impossible to pay for a coffee using BTC.
By disabling its blockchain for fundamental tasks, BTC chose to expose its users to the risk of a DeFi protocol called Lightning Network (LN), so BTC takes Satoshi Nakamoto's masterpiece, which revolutionized the digital world, and places it below LN , as an adjunct to the system, displacing Satoshi's philosophy, which is based on security and blockchain development.
Laugh network
The LN should serve to perform micropayments, without the need to use the Blockchain in all transactions except for the opening and closing of the channel between Blockchain and LN. But micropayments represent the majority of transactions, which would therefore be done over an insecure DeFi protocol, and would despise Blockchain development.
Currently, BCH processes thousands of transactions every day with an average transaction fee of zero dollars. Enabling people to use Satoshi's secure blockchain for their daily uses of virtually any value. On average $74K in transactions are processed every day on the BCH network, and this is approximately 12% of the daily dollar volume of the BTC network. But the network that they say will be able to facilitate purchases with BTC so far averages just over $7,000 on their network nodes. It's for laughing a lot!
Some important data
The LN only has approximately 0.014% of the total possible BTC in the blockchain, so it has a long way to go in meeting the demand for micropayments. Even maintaining this growth of 103.57% in dollars every 90 days, it would take 20 months to reach only the current average demand in total volume of daily payments by BCH.
These numbers show how much LN is still an incipient network. The main currencies in the market preferred to make their blockchain more scalable than using an alternative like LN, with some exceptions like Litecoin, in which there are uncreative developers who always repeat what BTC does. But in general the developers of other cryptocurrencies prefer the blockchain because DeFi is still a protocol that is still in development, and that brings numerous risks to its users.
We know that LN's goal is not really to facilitate micropayments with BTC, but to prevent the blockchain from developing that could harm competing payment service companies. After all, BTC has countless users and enthusiasts that if they were really confident in using the LN protocol, the adhesion numbers would already be significant today, but what significant number of companies or services will have the courage to implement LN? Even more with the alternative of using the Blockchain! That's why companies and their services are developing in other currencies like BCH, BNB, TRON, ADA, ETH and many others!
Conclusion
Although it has grown over 100% in 90 days, LN is far from achieving its goals, the BTC fork, despite having the greatest popularity among all cryptocurrencies, has not been successful in implementing LN, as it is an incipient DeFi protocol and that presents risks, unlike the alternative with the protocol based only on the Blockchain, which has already been proven to be safe and robust.
We will hardly see initiatives from companies that want to implement their services within the LN protocol, on a significant scale, since there are other better and safer alternatives, as is the case with the BCH. Ultimately it all depends on the Blockstream lobby and how many people they are able to deceive.
Noise
BCH - Brazil
