The Lightning Network is fast, but it kinda sucks.

I ran my own Lightning node for over 1 year, so I have so personal experience with it. And the model works is it's simplicity, but I strongly believe that it sucks. The entire channel system sucks.

The main reason is how shit is it to actually have a node to spend. Unless you have a ton of sats to create a big channel to a place you will use frequently, you are gonna end up needing to reopen channels all the time and won't be any better off than using on chain.

This leads to the use of services like Loop, and those are both expensive and risky.

If you look at the trend too, centralization in Lightning is overt, where big nodes grow bigger over time, because they provide the least amount of jumps and the most usefulness for most spend user.

I honestly don't think the channel model is going to survive contact with hyperbitcoinization.

Edit 1: I don't think some of you are getting my point. Scenario: You get paid. Now you need to pay the bills. If you want to do this via LN you have to open a channel to your energy supplier for instance. Unless you have sats to open a channel worth multiple months of that bill, it won't be any cheaper or faster than using on-chain. And who is gonna have that? Multiple months of bills to put up front? Sure, if you want to budget a 1M sats channel for Starbucks that could work for a while, bu'r essentially LN forces you to "pre-pay" everything. The solution for this is hiding all of this from the end user like Muun or Phoenix does. But you are then centralising the services and if you are doing that there are better theoretical solutions.

Edit 2: This is a legit gripe I have but the posting and phrasing was made volatile on purpose to see if it would survive being in the sub. Inspired by the "Bitcoin sucks" post about this being an echo chamber. Well, guess we are not as this is not downvoted to hell and people are actually engaging in debate.