quoting note1efy…qsm0I consider LN a done deal. The reasons were briefly posted on twitter already but since twitter account is deleted I'll provide them again here.
1) Serious LN dev is hard and time consuming, I no longer have time or resources to keep it up or even maintain what has been developed so far. In my opinion the whole LN protocol is overly complex and is getting worse and at this point can only be developed by very few high profile specialists at a very slow pace. Philosophically, I think Bitcoin as a protocol should have a complexity barrier such that it does not get beyond a point where laymen just can't understand and trust it, I think LN has already passed that barrier.
2) It's been 6+ years of struggle to get LN anywhere beyond a community of mostly ideological users with no visible success or perspective. My opinion is ultimately LN is not what market at large wants from Bitcoin and folks should look into other directions besides dumb payments, and not overly fixate on LN.
3) Remaining LN demand has been mostly absorbed by various custodial solutions. A truly non-custodial LN wallet will always be worse than a custodial one in UX terms and historically we see that majority of remaining users consistently choose convenience over control. This makes developing end-user non-custodial LN solutions feel like the most thankless thing in the world.
note1c0y…zysr
This is the technical layer. The liquidity requirements condemned LN from the start to VC subsidies, early adopters risking their bitcoin without being compensated (doesn't scale and isn't sustainable), and centralization. LN liquidity is cheap and works well only when we have 3 nodes in total (small number).