Bitcoin Is Inevitable—But Lightning Is A Dead End, Warns Former Core Dev Garzik
Fifteen years after he first committed code to Bitcoin Core, Jeff Garzik still thinks the protocol will “outlast everything,” yet he no longer believes its flagship scaling project can keep pace with user demand. During a conversation with Bitcoin historian Pete Rizzo, the Hemi founder dismissed the Lightning Network as a “red herring” and laid out a roadmap in which programmable Layer-2s, not payment channels, bring the next billion users to BTC.
“Lightning is a failure. Very few people are using it, and it kept BTC locked on a bad sidetrack,” Garzik said, adding that the network “was a way to pump Lightning instead of alternate working solutions like layer-twos.”
He pointed to hard numbers: “Look at the outcome. We 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 limited traction on what he calls Bitcoin’s “vetocracy”—a governance culture in which any one faction can veto consensus changes. That culture, he argues, has “o-ified” the base layer since the 2017 block-size stalemate: “Bitcoin development basically stopped after 2017. OP_CAT, covenants—perfectly safe opcodes—have been studied to death, but the politics won’t let them in. So builders left. They went where they could ship.”
According to the former Core maintainer, the flight is measurable. Public Lightning capacity hovers near 5,300 BTC, or roughly $500 million, while Wrapped BTC and related bridged tokens now exceed 130,000 BTC—over $14 billion in raw collateral. Node counts tell the same story: about 16,000 publicly visible Lightning nodes versus more than 600,000 addresses holding Wrapped BTC.
Garzik’s critique is philosophical as well as technical. He repeated a line that startled the live audience: “Bitcoin is a social network first and a monetary network second. Its value comes from people coordinating around it, not from any single line of code. But that same social layer can veto innovation, and that’s how we got stuck.”
https://bitcoinist.com/bitcoin-lightning-dead-end-former-core-dev-garzik/