There is a peculiar type of person who announces, with the …

There is a peculiar type of person who announces, with the pride of a man who has just discovered fire, that he uses the Lightning Network and therefore uses digital cash.
One must admire the confidence. It takes a special kind of courage to misunderstand a system so completely and then volunteer the fact publicly.
The argument invariably proceeds as follows:
"I bought a coffee using Lightning."
Wonderful. A man once crossed the Atlantic in a rowboat. It does not follow that rowboats are the future of global shipping.
The confusion arises because these people mistake the existence of a payment for the architecture that enables it. They see money move and conclude they have witnessed Bitcoin functioning as digital cash. This is rather like seeing water come from a tap and concluding one has understood hydraulic engineering.
What they are actually using is a network of payment channels, liquidity providers, routing nodes, custodians, trust assumptions, and intermediaries. They then declare, with immense satisfaction, that they have eliminated intermediaries.
One is reminded of the man who hires six servants to help him prove he is self-sufficient.
The beauty of the performance lies in its innocence.
They proudly explain that payments are instant because they occur off-chain.
They proudly explain that fees are low because they occur off-chain.
They proudly explain that scaling is possible because transactions occur off-chain.
At no point does it occur to them that they have just spent twenty minutes explaining why the system cannot perform these functions on the chain itself.
It is rather like a gentleman boasting that his horse can fly, then revealing an aircraft hidden underneath it.
And then comes the masterpiece.
They point to a successful payment and declare victory.
A single payment.
Two payments.
A week's worth of payments.
The logic appears to be that because a village bridge can support one bicycle, it is therefore ready for every truck in Europe.
Scale, in their minds, is not demonstrated by handling large volumes. It is demonstrated by imagining them.
One almost feels guilty criticising them. It is difficult to mock a man who is so enthusiastically participating in his own misunderstanding.
The truly amusing part is that they speak of "trustless" systems while relying on increasingly concentrated hubs of liquidity and infrastructure. They speak of eliminating third parties while constructing elaborate networks of third parties. They speak of digital cash while celebrating a mechanism designed specifically to avoid using the underlying system for payments.
The entire spectacle resembles a group of men standing on a broken railway line, congratulating themselves on the excellence of the bus service that was introduced to compensate for it.
And yet they remain convinced they are defending some revolutionary insight.
One cannot help but admire the determination.
After all, it takes real commitment to spend years building a banking layer and then insist, with a perfectly straight face, that one has abolished banking.