Saw this on X, how do you refute this argument? 👇 Lightning was never about scaling. It was about avoiding reality. A system built on the idea that you can move risk off-chain by pretending trust doesn’t exist. It works, yes—but only when no one uses it. As soon as it scales, the fantasy collapses. Liquidity dries up, routes fail, and payments hang because someone, somewhere, didn’t have inbound capacity. The network becomes a web of locked capital, every transaction dragging a chain of costs behind it. When the whitepaper was published in 2015, Poon and Dryja admitted the flaw. The system depends on pre-funded channels—money frozen in pipes, earning nothing. In practice, only large custodial hubs can afford to keep those channels open, meaning Lightning centralises faster than the system it claims to replace. Users migrate to these hubs for reliability, surrendering control and recreating the very intermediaries Bitcoin was designed to eliminate. At scale, the myth of “cheap payments” disintegrates. Rebalancing, failed routes, HTLC limits, and on/off-chain fees pile up. Those pennies in a demo become dollars in the wild. A mass close event—thousands of channels trying to settle simultaneously—would clog the base chain, raise fees beyond reason, and strand users mid-transaction. The justice system that keeps nodes honest only works if everyone stays online and mempools stay orderly. Neither assumption survives reality. Lightning isn’t a revolution. It’s a delay mechanism—a temporary illusion of scalability built on shifting complexity elsewhere. It functions so long as people believe they won’t need to use it. The irony is sharp: BTC survives only while it sleeps. The moment it wakes—when real commerce starts—the system breaks.