Censorship in r/btc: This statistic of ~10% of Bitcoin payments already occurring via Lightning will get you perma-banned there.

TLDR in one picture: here.

The amount of transactions on the LN are difficult to measure because of their inherently peer-to-peer nature. Nodes who are not involved in routing a transaction do not gather any knowledge about the transaction occurring. One option to create an estimate of the total transaction volume is to take known statistics of selected nodes and extrapolate total volume based on the probability that those nodes appear in a payment route. This has been done by Arcane Research in the The State of Lightning Volume 2 and provides estimates between January 2020 and February 2022.

We can extrapolate the data further by assuming that the transaction volume in the whole Lightning Network has grown similarly to the number of transactions handled by the Wallet of Satoshi which provides growth data up to September 2022.

Combining both results in this graph, which shows

• ~10% of Bitcoin payments use Lightning Network
• LN processes ~2.5x as many payments as BCH

Since r/btc is regularly flooded with LN FUD, I have posted this statistic there. The result was not only a removal of the comment but a perma-ban of my account without any warnings.

r/btc regularly engages in censorship when confronted with LN facts in the following stages:

• Stage 1/7: Downvotes
• Stage 2/7: Ad hominems (e.g. insults)
• Stage 3/7: Downvote brigading and public humiliation (e.g. mod supported, dedicated front page posts directing downvotes and invective at LN supporters )
• Stage 4/7: Labelling facts about LN as "misleading" (e.g. here)
• Stage 5/7: Locking post to prevent discussion (e.g. here)
• Stage 6/7: Post removals (this post)
• Stage 7/7: Permaban (this post)