Critics of the Lightning Network believe that:

All payments will route through a few hubs

Hubs will act like banks, collecting passports and utility bills for KYC

Hubs must apply for money transmission licenses

Proponents of the Lightning Network offer a much brighter picture:

Lightning Network will improve decentralization by giving less power to mining cartels

Privacy/fungibility will improve through the use of multi-hop payment channels and the Tor network

King of the Nodes

When I started writing the review the total capacity of the Lightning Network was slightly over 20 BTC (around $130,000). I decide to shake things up.

The deposits to my node have confirmed. I set up a terminal window on the lnd node with four panes. Each pane polls my node for stats.

Bitcoin amounts are displayed in satoshis. To convert from satoshis/sats to bitcoin, I divide the number by 100 million or 10⁸.

The top-left pane shows the output of lncli walletbalance . This tells me how much on-chain bitcoin is held in the node. The unconfirmed_balance shows how many bitcoin are in yet-to-be-mined transactions. I guess these transactions are from opening and closing Lightning Network payment channels.

The top-right pane shows the output of the lncli channelbalance command. This shows the total capacity of all my open channels, balance . The pending_open_balance number shows how much bitcoin is being used to establish channels.