Actually, i've been testing and accepting LN payments on my demo site for quite a while already...
I personally find eclair mobile pretty user friendly. Offcourse, there's still a learning curve that's far bigger if you compare it with visa. Afterall, everybody has seen their grandparents, parents,... using VISA since they were born, so the visa-learning curve started allmost at birth. This offcourse isn't the case with BTC/LN.

Basically, you have to incentivise your clients to:

• 1) Install a decent desktop wallet on their pc
• 2) fund their desktop wallet with a couple hundred bucks worth of BTC
• 3) install a LN client on their mobile phone, create a new address, fund the address with "spending money"
• 4) open a channel between the client and the store's node, fund it

After these 4 steps, a store can generate a lightning invoice (QR) and let the customer scan and pay straight away... Works flawlessly, but still, i don't see my mother performing these steps...
Also, the fact that you'd have to close the current channel if you wish to open a new one (when you have insufficient funds in your current channel for planned expenses) is a drawback.

You can actually skip step 1, and switch step 2 and 3 (create a LN wallet right away, create a deposit addy and fund it straight from the exchange), but i would discourage anybody to keep a lot of funds on a mobile wallet.

The biggest "drawbacks" would probably be to get somebody to visit an exchange or some other seller to exchange FIAT to BTC...

Having Ln be a part of our daily lives is a great concept and will make things much easier, at least for us because we know how it works and we know its potential, so accepting as a payment method would make sense, but most of the current generation of shops and owners are not yet aware of that, they either accept cash or credit cards and having them start accepting LN as a payment method will take some time, as there is no support for the system by the governments, and the number of people who actually use it today in their businesses who use it in their own incentive is very small, therefor its gonna take some time for it to grow and have a strong foothold in the market.

That's true... But in reality, if a store tells their customers to just create 1 channel to 1 node and fund it, they'll have to offer support if a route does not exist... They'll have a customer standing in front of their cash register trying to scan a QR code and getting an error message telling them (and the clerck) nothing at all...  If a store just tells their customers to open a channel directly to their node, it would cut back on support questions immensely.

But, once again, in theory, you are 100% correct and if everything works and grows as expected, my version of the facts might be a tad to complex.

I'm running a LN for many months now, and i've accepted over 70 LN payments (not an impressive number, i know), but all of the payments came from customers that opened a direct channel between their client and my node...

Suggesting is a broad concept   But yes, i've published a walktrough, and offcourse the walktrough include steps to make a channel with my node (it does contain a part for longtime LN users telling them that if they already have opened channels, they can try if there's a route before opening a channel to me directly)... It wouldn't make sense to let a customer that's new to the LN make a connection to a different node and then hope there'll be a route between the node they made a channel to and mine... But that's actually my point: in theory, you are 100% correct, and your statements make more sense than mine, but in reality it's easyer to just spoonfeed your customer and let them make a channel with your node directly to cut back on support calls... This also saves on routing fees (eventough they are really small)

As for the remark that my node it well connected:

Lighting network is very nice and useful in theory. But in practice we could not see what it would bring to work. Let's see this first, then we'll talk about it.

I want to believe as time goes by, this processes and steps to use the lighting network would be further simplified or seamless because if all these steps are not simplified as a result of further developments, the limitations would not only be applicable to parents and grandparents but also people who are young because in the real sense. Its more complicated just looking at it and the conditions attached of loading couple of bucks in other to use is another major turn off which would shift people to a more accommodating alternative.

You don't need to "want to believe", it's already much simpler if you stick with wallet default settings.


The simplest, and default way to setup a Lightning wallet is like this:

1. Send some BTC to your wallet
2. Wait till the wallet finishes automatically opening some channels

They could use both, and in some cases, ditch one for another. I don't think LN's goal is to replace Visa per se, but to be a better, or at least a workable alternative. That drives adoption.

If what you are saying is absolutely true, then Bitcoin is basically locked to enthusiasts and all we're doing is playing in a sandbox.

the  argument should not be about merchants accepting bitcoin through lightning network or through VISA. the argument should instead be about whether merchants should use the centralized services such as VISA or use decentralized currency/payment system called bitcoin. then how they use bitcoin is their choice. additionally any shop that implements lightning network to accept payments should also accept on chain transactions too. so again the argument is about bitcoin versus Visa.

the result is that any user who has a bitcoin wallet makes the payments easily and anyone who is more "advanced" and has LN wallets can pay with that instead.