Fifteen years after he first dedicated code to Bitcoin Core, Jeff Garzik nonetheless thinks the protocol will “outlast all the pieces,” but he not believes its flagship scaling mission can hold tempo with person demand. Throughout a dialog with Bitcoin historian Pete Rizzo, the Hemi founder dismissed the Lightning Community as a “pink herring” and laid out a roadmap by which programmable Layer-2s, not cost channels, convey the following billion customers to BTC.
Bitcoin Lightning Is A Lifeless Finish
“Lightning is a failure. Only a few persons are utilizing it, and it saved BTC locked on a nasty sidetrack,” Garzik mentioned, including that the community “was a strategy to pump Lightning as a substitute of alternate working options like layer-twos.”He pointed to laborious numbers: “Take a look at the end result. We now have roughly 5,000 BTC on Lightning after seven years. Wrapped Bitcoin on Ethereum alone is 25 × that. Capital has already voted.”
Garzik blames Lightning’s restricted traction on what he calls Bitcoin’s “vetocracy”—a governance tradition by which anybody faction can veto consensus modifications. That tradition, he argues, has “o-ified” the bottom layer because the 2017 block-size stalemate: “Bitcoin growth principally stopped after 2017. OP_CAT, covenants—completely protected opcodes—have been studied to loss of life, however the politics gained’t allow them to in. So builders left. They went the place they might ship.”
In response to the previous Core maintainer, the flight is measurable. Public Lightning capability hovers close to 5,300 BTC, or roughly $500 million, whereas Wrapped BTC and associated bridged tokens now exceed 130,000 BTC—over $14 billion in uncooked collateral. Node counts inform the identical story: about 16,000 publicly seen Lightning nodes versus greater than 600,000 addresses holding Wrapped BTC.
Garzik’s critique is philosophical in addition to technical. He repeated a line that startled the reside viewers: “Bitcoin is a social community first and a financial community second. Its worth comes from individuals coordinating round it, not from any single line of code. However that very same social layer can veto innovation, and that’s how we acquired caught.”
As a result of the social consensus resists base-layer change, Garzik sees the longer term in sidechains like his personal mission, Hemi. The platform embeds a totally validating BTC node inside an Ethereum-compatible roll-up, secured by proof-of-proof mining and BitVM fraud proofs. Good contracts can “learn and act on Bitcoin Layer-1 with out custodial bridges,” he mentioned, calling the design “EVM trial-by-fire grafted onto Bitcoin super-finality.”
“All of the issues constructed prior to now fifteen years—stablecoins, DeFi, id—are coming to Bitcoin. The one query is whether or not Lightning zealots will stand in the way in which.”
Lightning proponents notice that capability figures exclude non-public channels and that routing revenues are starting to draw skilled operators. But even bullish analysis from Constancy Digital Property concedes that public capability has plateaued between 4,400 BTC and 5,600 BTC since 2022, rising way more in greenback phrases than in cash.
Garzik argues that stagnation is structural: “Lightning is nice if you wish to transfer a coffee-cup’s price of Bitcoin at mild velocity. It’s ineffective if you’d like autonomous lending, derivatives, or billion-dollar settlement. For that you simply want programmable belief, and Lightning doesn’t have it.”
However Bitcoin Will Outlive All the pieces
Regardless of the criticism, Garzik underlined that BTC’s financial position is safe. “Bitcoin will reside alongside gold. It’s the trunk; all the pieces else is the foliage,” he mentioned. The inevitability thesis rests on community results, regulatory readability, and deep-pocketed holders corresponding to sovereign wealth funds: “Each incentive within the system factors again to Bitcoin. That gained’t change.”
However inevitability, he warned, just isn’t development: “Bitcoin isn’t going away, nevertheless it isn’t upgrading both. If we would like self-sovereignty for eight billion individuals, we have now to increase programmability with out compromising the asset the world already trusts. Meaning Layer-2s—and meaning leaving Lightning within the rear-view mirror.”
Whether or not the broader ecosystem agrees could hinge on tangible metrics within the coming yr: capital allotted to Lightning versus rising BitVM roll-ups, node counts versus wrapped-BTC provide, and, finally, the charges customers are prepared to pay for every path. For now, Garzik’s message is blunt: Bitcoin’s future is assured, however Lightning just isn’t.
At press time, BTC traded at $108,838.
Featured picture created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
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