When someone holds your funds, these days everyone recognizes the inherent risk: The custodian might misuse the money or fail to safeguard it properly, since it isn’t theirs. But here’s the flip side: Delaying a payment carries just as much danger. When payments stall, the economy slows, productivity dips and the benefits for everyone diminish. It’s like plaque building up in arteries: You can still function, but friction drags down the entire system. If the arteries clog so much that blood can’t flow, the patient dies. The same applies to today’s banking system. The instant a bank halts all payments, it’s a flatline on the heart monitor. Unless they jolt the system with a financial defibrillator to unclog those monetary arteries, that bank — even if it holds funds — will collapse fast.

Centralization isn’t just a banking problem — it’s baked into how Bitcoin’s own advocates operate, and I’ve got a beef with that. Most Bitcoin podcasts aim to orange-pill listeners and are pure gold (that term will lose its value on a bitcoin standard) for anyone seeking the signal — I wouldn’t be here without them. Yet, they preach theory on fiat platforms where you’re dodging ad interruptions that worsen as the platforms grow, mimicking the social media they critique: You’re the product, advertisers the clients, just with different labels — channels, subscribers, sponsors.

Hypocrisy aside, this fiat setup fuels centralization, and influencers unintentionally help it along. Why are almost none experimenting with Nostr, a prime Lightning Network use case? I urged one channel to try it, but they ignored me — until YouTube axed them for a bullshit reason. Within 24 hours, they set up on Nostr and saw its power firsthand.

When a sponsor signs on, they often demand exclusivity for their product or service type. That’s the first choke hold: Your selection isn’t shaped by a free market but by whoever pays up. Listeners miss out on other options, and the winner isn’t the best product — it’s the one that locked in early with a podcast before it blew up. Now that these channels are big, sponsors won’t bother with smaller podcasters. The larger the channel grows, the more they plug their sponsors, driving more sales, which funnels more ad cash their way. As both balloon, “natural censorship” creeps in — exclusive contracts that edge out competing products. They’re not just centralizing the product market; they’re consolidating the podcasting scene itself. Successful companies chase bigger subscriber counts, raising the bar for new podcasters. That target keeps drifting further out of reach each year.

All this unfolds on three or four centralized fiat platforms — already walled gardens where no newcomer can break in until they’re so unbearable that an alternative emerges. Oh wait, Nostr could be that alternative, but these podcasters won’t invest a shred of time to experiment with it or try to shift their audience over. You need an alternative.

Enter the Lightning Network.

Whenever you take a step toward a goal, your reward doesn’t come later — it settles instantly. The universe balances itself in real time, and the Lightning Network mirrors this dynamic. It can be achieved technically on a third layer built atop Lightning, but let’s not get bogged down in details. Lightning is the key that makes it all work.

What does the Lightning Network enable that makes the difference from the current financial system, and why doesn’t the same problem occur there? The key difference lies in its foundation: Lightning isn’t built on fictional units like debt. In fiat payment systems, your deposits don’t generate credit — credit creates your deposits. This means that when issues arise with tangible assets, the system can be manipulated through its fictional base, which relies solely on people’s belief in it. Debt is disconnected from reality and relies on faith alone.

In Bitcoin’s Lightning Network, the structure flips. Here, real units, backed by actual energy, form the bedrock. If fictional units sneak in (say, from a bad actor), they sit atop this unmovable foundation. When a problem hits Bitcoin’s system, it purges those fake units, flushing out cheaters. Should this happen in Lightning, a bundle of channels will get closed. Just like a healthy body with a clogged vein, the system reroutes, forging new pathways for blood to flow. Lightning behaves the same way: If one channel gets blocked, the network adapts by opening new ones or rerouting the flow for you.

There’s one key twist in this analogy. Unlike the body, where the heart acts as your central pump, the Lightning Network has no single entity driving it, meaning no single failure can collapse the system. The closest equivalent might be a custodial Lightning solution, but even they are spread across multiple apps and companies, and their numbers are growing. If one goes under, the network doesn’t falter; it detoxifies itself by purging that bad actor and keeps running. New channels spring up to meet the fresh demand. This is Lightning’s version of the difficulty adjustment. When one app gets blocked or fails, the others grow more profitable, stepping in to fill the gap — whether it’s a specific use case or a region — which ensures the system adapts and thrives. 

Despite its drawbacks, Lightning is already carving out a critical role in the ecosystem. Whether you’re a company or an individual, you will receive value-for-value payments in some form via Lightning. All the networks addressing the shortcomings of Bitcoin’s timechain and Lightning itself will link up through it. As my mentor Roy Sheinfeld put it: Lightning is the common language we all speak in Bitcoin. Be it custodial solutions like Cashu, federations like Fedimint or Ark, or others yet, each tackles a specific use case valuable to you or certain groups. But connecting directly via the timechain isn’t efficient — and for some, it’s likely unusable. Imagine you’re paying from a Cashu wallet to a Fedimint wallet, waiting 10 minutes for a first-layer confirmation, and the congestion that would pile up. Lightning already bridges that gap for you. Any network skipping Lightning integration at this stage is likely to doom itself to a swift demise before it even takes flight. It’s not just a tool — it’s core.

One very important point: Lightning is bitcoin. It’s not a token pegged to bitcoin’s unit of account; it’s an integral part of the system, not a parallel offshoot. All other potential edge networks will need to tie into it because relying solely on the timechain would clog the system and jack up fees unnecessarily. Yet, even if fees do spike, that’s just another nudge pushing you to figure out Lightning. Unlike the fiat world, Bitcoin operates as a free market. It’s voluntary, and everyone faces the economic fallout of their choices. Think of it like the laws of physics: The world doesn’t care if you grasp them. Misstep and you feel the sting, just like with the Lightning Network, aka Bitcoin itself. This freedom enables new tools, like split payments — another game changer. 

Lightning enables split payments, and that’s bad news for the “Decentralized Blockchain” crowd. Most are not decentralized at all, but my point is sharper:

The Lightning Network doesn’t just steal their speed advantage, it dismantles buzzword promises like DeFi and DAO.

I won’t dwell on their flaws; let’s focus on what they claim to you. They promise finance will spread out in a decentralized way, with organizations that aren’t single entities but distributed networks. 

But how can you build anything decentralized on a centralized blockchain? Split payments turn that from theory to practice for you. With split payments, funds hit everyone instantly, divvied up based on the work they’ve done. You do not wait for someone to pass the money to you, and no one games the system by “printing” extra digits in the process.

Now, let’s merge these two features — instant settlement and split payments — and explore the possibilities for you. Instant settlement means your work is no longer tied to time-based salaries. You complete a task, you get paid; you don’t, you won’t. Make that payment a split one, and everyone (or every entity) involved in the job gets their share automatically — all in one seamless, atomic transaction from the buyer.

Here’s why this matters to you. Split payments are the technical glue that aligns all collaborating parties around you. Just as fiat-denominated prices sync everyone to drive bitcoin’s value upward, Lightning’s split payments unite everyone involved in a transaction to deliver the product or service. If my efforts boost sales, you benefit. If you ramp up sales, I win too. This isn’t some theoretical sketch — it’s practical, unlike Amazon or any brick-and-mortar retailer you might deal with now. When I buy an audiobook online with fiat, I’m hit with hefty payment processing fees funneled to a handful of monopolists. Then, you, the author, get a report from Amazon about those sales. How do you know that the report is not altered? Worse, Amazon doesn’t pay you instantly for each book. So, the money doesn’t reach you when the reader pays, you can’t verify what you’re owed, and you’re stuck with higher fees on what finally trickles through.

With the Lightning Network, your experience is completely different. When a reader buys an audiobook, Lightning can instantly distribute the payment to the platform, author, narrator, editor and mastering engineer, anywhere in the world, simultaneously, without any currency conversions needed. Why isn’t this a thing yet? Simple: No one has built it (yet).

The tech exists today; it’s just waiting for someone to craft the experience. Now, picture that exact same process applied to any product or service you use. And not just products — value can stream too.

What other streaming value services do I mean besides video? Any continuous flow of value can trigger a payment stream in return. 

Picture the electricity humming into your home: You can stream payments to everyone who keeps it flowing to you. Anything tied to that power, like massage chairs, arcade games, or even your rent, could run on a streaming model, too. 

Transportation’s another fit: pay per meter, unlike in taxis that calculate distance and settle up at the end of the ride. With streaming, you pay and settle per meter distance; paid and settled in real time. 

Lightning’s versatility extends beyond streaming to media and unlocks pretty cool experiences. Thanks to split payments, sponsors won’t shell out for views — they’ll pay a commission per sale. Imagine this: A sponsor strikes a deal with a podcaster, agreeing to send 10% (just an example) of each product sale directly to the channel via split payment. The sponsor’s marketing budget? Zero! No up-front costs, no cash wasted on bot-pumped views or hollow metrics. With no financial risk, they can approach any podcaster — big or small — and hand them a QR code or link that routes the 10% commission. A podcaster with five followers could make five sales, netting five payments. Zero barriers to entry mean funds flow freely, decentralizing podcasters’ access to revenue and shattering the stranglehold of a few big players on sponsorships.

Flip it to the podcasters’ side: They’re no longer shackled to companies with deep pockets. In a split-payment setup, the consumer foots the bill, so podcasters can pitch any product — even competing ones — and tailor choices to their audience, the ones they actually should care about. Even if they don’t want to prioritize listeners, they’ll have to — the audience remains the client, not the product. Bite the hand that feeds them, and those listeners will stop buying recommendations. Plus, podcasters can ditch any product anytime, for any reason. They gain real freedom to choose what they promote, or rather, sell. This decentralizes product advertising, letting the market sort out the best options, not just the ones that muscled into the marketing game early, which is the case today. 

Some are trying to get out of this already. There’s a solid example of podcasters using Lightning: value-for-value. It’s not fiat — it’s pure Lightning, and I’m all for it. But it’s a charity model, so I doubt it’s long-term sustainable. (Only top creators can live off it.) Still, it’s a sweet bonus to the model I foresee for the future. In today’s system, donating to creators means absurd fees and little anonymity. The Lightning Network sidesteps that, and value-for-value is a nice cherry on top.

So, what does this mean for people? For the lazy clock-milkers among you, it’s a nightmare. Take government workers at any national agency as the perfect example. Whenever I need to fill out a form for some bureaucratic permission, the staff behind the counter are total sloths — I can see it etched on their faces every time I step up to the window: Do not make me work! Imagine if they were paid per processed form. With Lightning, that future might just arrive.

Beyond that, this sparks a competitive environment. Not only are you paid for the work you do, but the person delivering 10 times better results than their colleague will earn 10 times more. The gap in performance will mirror their sats income. In today’s system, that high achiever is the “sucker” — busting their tail for the same paycheck as the slacker at month’s end. This shift is yet another ripple effect Lightning will unleash.

With competition now tied to work done, Lightning payments pull us back to nature’s roots. The universe doesn’t reward sloth. No species sits idle and rakes in resources. Entropy acts as the enforcer there: Organisms that don’t work hard enough to sustain themselves vanish. The same logic applies to a pay-for-work system. Entropy becomes the forcing function, driving you not just to perform but to outpace your colleagues for the finite sats in Bitcoin’s ecosystem. Slack off, and you’ll economically starve, left to build a fully autonomous life without human interaction. Good luck pulling that off.

If you want to engage with others, money is the simplest way to coordinate activities. Using the best money lets you outshine networks that don’t. Just paying for work and enabling split payments isn’t enough: All currencies and their payment systems are locked in the same race. Some networks have already starved and hitched themselves to stronger ones, but Bitcoin is outpacing them all. When you are using Lightning Network payments you will reap three rewards. 

First, you earn for the work you do (value for value) — technically possible elsewhere, but practically a pipe dream if you are a company employee. Second, doing the work hones your skills, unlike time-based pay networks where your skills erode while watching the clock for a paycheck. Third, your purchasing power grows by tapping into a money network that outperforms every rival. In fiat, you’re guaranteed to lose value, and in other blockchains, you’re sidetracked into trading instead of working. Over time, Lightning will be the default (and possibly the only) choice to be competitive in the market.

By reaping these three benefits, people who stick with it for years will grow tighter-knit within Bitcoin’s social network, finding it increasingly effortless to get paid for their work. Over time, their skills will sharpen, making them even more sought-after for jobs. Plus, saving in bitcoin frees them up to pursue whatever they want next, unburdened by financial constraints.

It’s time to stop preaching about bitcoin, waiting for the price to climb on its own, and start crafting experiences that sidestep fiat entirely — price be damned. It’ll take serious effort, no doubt, but what system are you fighting for? Talking up bitcoin is a losing battle; anyone can lob counterarguments. Delivering a tangible experience, though? That’s undeniable.

Building it on the Lightning Network can make it leagues better than fiat payment rails, so you won’t even need to persuade people to switch — they’ll feel the difference. It’s on us, though. Do you care enough to help free people into a new cooperative system, or are you just out to stack the most bitcoin in your hardware wallet, happy to leave everyone else with a fiat experience? Every choice we make counts, but crafting those experiences on this new system is the surest way to shift others’ behavior, bringing them along for the ride. That’s the best you can do for the network.

We can’t just kick back, listen to podcasts, buy bitcoin and wait for game theory to unfold. That won’t happen unless we build solutions. Not every Bitcoin idea will pan out — that’s the free and open market doing its job — but if we don’t design experiences for this new system, we’ll just end up with digital gold 2.0, ripe for capture. The best way to deliver those solutions and shield against that fate is to build on Lightning. It’s the engine for a parallel economy, so pick a side: fuel its growth or let the fiat lords strangle its flow by limiting it to the first layer only. The promise of Bitcoin to free individuals financially does not happen by itself. This freedom demands action — will you answer the call?

Don’t miss your chance to own The Lightning Issue — featuring an exclusive interview with Lightning co-creator Tadge Dryja. It dives deep into Bitcoin’s most powerful scaling layer. Limited run. Only available while supplies last.

This piece is an article featured in the latest Print edition of Bitcoin Magazine, The Lightning Issue. We’re sharing it here to show the ideas explored throughout the full issue.