If you have been around for a few years, you are familiar with the catch-22 of Bitcoin adoption. People can’t spend it anywhere because merchant don’t accept it and merchants don’t accept it because no one spends it.

Through a lot of hardwork, new merchants were created, some were convinced, and a healthy appreciation of Bitcoin allowed people to spend it. Little by little, bigger merchants such as Overstocked, Square, Steam, and 100,000+ more merchants through Bitpay started accepting Bitcoin payments worldwide.

This came to a screeching halt as fees exploded at the end of 2017, Steam and Square stopped accepting Bitcoin all together and Bitpay announced a $100 payment minimum (later reduced as fees declined). This has been a stunning reversal of years of work on adoption and gave a lot of credence to the arguments for BCH.

Now this is a relatively common talking point, I want to talk about how the perceived adoption of Lightning consists of a “If you build it, they will come” mentality. For the context of this article, I will assume that all the technical issues of the lightning network have been overcome and it is infinitely scalable.

First, let’s talk about how Bitcoin was adopted on a face-to-face basis:

1. Existing owner talks to a member of the public (“MOP”) about the exciting world of Bitcoin.

2. MOP expresses interest and downloads Bitcoin wallet app.

3. Existing owner sends $1 to MOP to demonstrate the future of money.

4. MOP impressed with the whole process, investigates Bitcoin further at a later date.

Now consider how that could work with the lightning network.

1. A lightning mobile wallet can’t currently receive payments.

2. Assuming it could, the existing owner needs to start with a regular BTC payment to the MOP so the MOP can open a channel and start autopilot 5 (A total of three onchain transactions that need to be confirmed). Extending demo time by 20 to 30 minutes.

3. Once the channel exists because it is loaded from the MOP side, they can’t receive any payments; they can only send it to someone else. Given that the number of recommended channel connections is ten, if there is only one channel open, the chances of sending successful are significantly limited to a narrow number of recipients.

This onboarding process for new users probably will not happen, most likely an existing user will just make a payment in front of the MOP and suggest that they look into it themselves. This will then put the initiative on the MOP to go through the process unguided of buying Bitcoin somewhere, load a channel and start autopilot 5 themselves.

This is extremely unlikely, the easiest and most likely path for the MOP would open an account with coinbase and use the coinbase mobile app and website. If they want to send money to someone using lightning then they will just use the coinbase hub and coinbase channels to route this payment, these would already be set up, well funded and ready to go. Such a hub would have to have a massive number of channels to all the major vendors, exchanges, and service providers to ensure great customer service and ensure payments don’t fail.