This just shows you how high the demand is for cheap and fast global transactions. It is not unlikely that many of these channels are being run by the same people. The amazing thing for me is that despite the throttle and cap that are placed on amounts that can be used to fund these channels, people still use it for commercial payments. <It is still in a beta testing phase>  

I predict that if everything goes well towards the end of this year, that we might see full implementation and unrestricted use in early 2019.  

i know it right, i love it tbh!

unfortunately the adoption, specially by merchants does not work that way. they don't "rush in". it is a slow process of them weighing options and and doing risk assessment and then adding bitcoin payment to their platforms.
as for lightning network it is growing fast because there are a lot of people interested in it but it is not yet complete nor safe to use it for serious purposes. that will also take time.

Technically, at the beginning of project’s development, Satoshi Nakamoto, bitcoin’s father, imagined as a future possibility of lightning network to be built on payment channels. His idea is shortly described as the payment channel could be locked by related parties and their latest balances is the most recent transaction which shall be announced and stored in the BTC blockchain. In terms of payment channel, L.N allows its users to carry out their payment directly rather than announcing their transactions worldwide. Moreover, the related parties can effectively avoid expensive and time wasting interactions with btc blockchain by self –tracking their payments. In case of conflict happening which relates to balances on the L.N, the latest valid state recorded by parties to the blockchain could be sent by each party in order to automatically judge the fraud (if any)

It's tricky to track the progress of growth, as Lightning isn't easily measured in that way.  While one source may say ~1500 nodes, others may say ~2000.  At the time of posting, for example:

http://shabang.io/ currently lists 1560 nodes and 14260 channels
https://graph.lndexplorer.com/ says 1818 nodes, 5796 channels
and https://rompert.com/recksplorer/ 2133 nodes, 5864 channels

As such, all statistics should be treated strictly as estimates.

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Indeed.  The current implementations of Lightning do seem similar to ideas Satoshi discussed privately.  But, unless I'm failing at using the forum's search function, I can't see that Satoshi ever used the word "channels" here on the forum.  Slightly curious, but then it seems Satoshi had a habit of bouncing ideas off a select few people in private before implementing them.  

Isn't that because no one node is seeing all other nodes, so all these are seeing different subsets (presumably a large subset, but less than 100%)?  So it would be safe to conclude that there are a minimum of 2133 nodes, but how many more would be unknown?

Why would the shabang.io site list dramatically more channels than the other two?

As tweeted by Rawtx: https://twitter.com/rawtxapp/status/994601198148730880 and Patrick Chugh: https://twitter.com/patrickchugh/status/994473207758499840 on May 10, 2018, Rawtx's Mobile Lightning Wallet is available at the moment. Let's see the Android app's features which are described in https://rawtx.com

- Send and receive testnet Bitcoins on blockchain and lightning network.
- Support multiple wallets.
- Each wallet is composed of 2 accounts: checking account and savings account.
- Checking account = **funds on lightning network**, savings account = **funds on blockchain**.
- Only 1 wallet can run at any given time, but we are going to add possibility of running multiple wallets at the same time.
- Pay lightning invoices by QR code or lightning invoice.
- You can generate lightning invoices.
- You can directly get testnet coins from the faucet.
- Show outgoing and incomings payments on the lightning network.
- Transfer money from checking account->savings account by closing channels.
- Transfer money from savings account->checking account by creating channels to an existing peer or by QR code.
- Displays lightning network information (number of nodes, edges, etc.).
- Show a list of nodes and filter nodes by pubkey or alias.
- lnd-as-a-service: runs [lnd](https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd) in the background (can run 24/7 if the wallet is open) and you can access the instance even - outside the app by using the https certs and macaroons which are displayed in "About" screen.
- The battery usage seemed reasonable in our testings, but this is just a start and it will keep improving.
- Show lnd logs for debugging purposes.

There are some websites which support sending & receiving tesnet btc adopting the L.N, such as: htlc, ACNQ. You can check and prepare yourself a suitable wallet/ payment method in the time to come

That is great news. Just checked out the link that you mentioned and the numbers look great. The changes over the past 1-2 months are seriously awesome and the LN continues to gather momentum over time.

At this rate, I feel that the LN will come out of its experimental phase and go mainstream sometime next year.

It feels slightly disingenuous to say that prise rises are fuelling enthusiasm when part of that $5 million figure will be coming from the price rise itself.  If the price dropped down again tomorrow, it wouldn't mean that fewer people were using it.  It's probably best to stick to using BTC to measure the overall capacity.  That will avoid any moving goalposts.

those calling it a lightning bitcoin mainnet. or a bitcoin layer 2.. have no clue
those saying LN has great growth have no clue.

the sudden 'growth' is not real utility. but people 'buying channels' or getting free channels

one service offering "channel opening" is showing this as their tweet
https://twitter.com/lnbig_com/status/1112688601429614593
"Sum of all local balances from us: 618.75808533 BTC"

60% of LN balance belongs to one entity