I see more and more people talking about how Litecoin could be the best option to scale payments through the Lightning network. But here’s the interesting part: when you start looking at actual usage data, things aren’t so simple.

The reality is that the Lightning network heavily depends on third-party liquidity providers. And when we talk about larger payments, say above $50 to $100, failure rates are quite high. We’re talking about failure rates of 20% to 60% in many cases, mainly because there isn’t enough available inbound and outbound capacity when you need it.

What catches my attention the most is the centralization problem. Nodes that truly have the liquidity and funding to keep this running tend to be concentrated in a few hands. And that opens the door to surveillance and control issues that no one really wanted when the Lightning Network was first proposed.

Don’t get me wrong, Litecoin has its advantages. But the idea that Lightning is the ultimate solution to scale Bitcoin or any other network... well, in practice, there’s still a long way to go. The concept sounds good in theory, but when you test it in the real world, you see there are real limitations that need to be addressed before you can fully trust this.