this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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Yeah I made a bitcoin payment recently and I was very suprised to learn that my wallet (CakeWallet) doesn't support Lightning payments at all. So I had to do it the old way.
Very weird because bitcoin advocates always pushed it as the holy grail. But I guess bitcoin as an actual payment method is just really too niche for it to take off.
I recall back when Lightning was first come up with thinking how incredibly hacky a solution it was, full of awkward workarounds for the limitations of Bitcoin's blockchain. A few small changes to the blockchain would have made it so much simpler and more robust, but at that point Bitcoin's immutability had become such a fundamentalist religion that any such changes were absolutely rejected. They wouldn't even fiddle with the block size, let alone consider expanding its scripting capabilities.
Then Ethereum came along with the exact opposite philosophy, it's willing to continue making changes to the foundation layer with the overall goal of making Ethereum more functional for diverse applications. Ever since then it's just been a slow transition of everything useful moving over to Ethereum and Bitcoin becoming ever more insular and obsolete by comparison.
It seems like I haven't thought about Bitcoin in years. When this article came up it took me a moment to shift the mental gears and go "oh yeah, that. I guess it's still around."