Lightning Sucks, But It Could Help Build a Bitcoin Economy

That's according to Lightning Network co-creator and Lightning Labs co-founder Tadge Dryja, who spoke earlier this month at Scaling Bitcoin in Tel Aviv.

Plus, Sheinfeld said he plans to expand the startup to follow the Internet Service Provider model, operating channel connectivity for users as a Lightning Service Provider.

The lightning payments app Fold just raised $2.5 million to give bitcoiners a chance to spend their crypto at retailers like Target, Macy's and Domino's.

Although some hobbyist node operators currently make a few dollars a month in bitcoin, via routing fees, Lightning co-creator Dryja told CoinDesk that providing such services probably won't be a profitable business model, even if adoption increases.

Dryja stopped working on the open-source lightning project last year, because he felt the current development process, spearheaded by Lightning Labs and Blockstream, diverged from his vision for the bitcoin scaling solution.

Regardless of technical disagreements, Lightning Labs CTO Olaoluwa Osuntokun told CoinDesk he imagines a "Closed economy" with people both paying and receiving money through lightning, especially payments like hourly wages.

While Breez aims to convince other startups to also become LSPs, Lightning Labs is focused on providing software management services to businesses across the bitcoin economy.

"[We build] the tooling, things to run nodes ways to manage your capital or coins on lightning more effectively, things like that.

While Lightning Labs has a wallet of its own, Osuntokun said he would encourage others to fork the open-source software and focus on wallets for different use cases.

"That's one of the reasons I don't work at Lightning Labs anymore."