Miners and Bitcoin Lightning There’s been some weird ideas that if Lightning takes off, bitcoin miners might not make money from fees any more. Those of us involved are scratching our heads at this, but lets work it out: TL;DR: The bitcoin userbase is tiny. If we finally make bitcoin catch on for daily usage, miners will be just fine… Lightning payments are limited to 0.042 bitcoin. Large lightning payments are less reliable: it’s harder to find a route with the capacity you need. In practice, the 0.042 limit is an upper bound. Lightning charges fees by amount; miners charge by weight. So larger amounts will always be cheaper to send on-chain. My node currently says a median-sized transaction should pay 0.00047; that’s a 0.1% fee for a 0.042 bitcoin transaction which is pretty cheap. Lightning makes bitcoin useful for payments. No waiting for confirmations, or using unconfirmed transactions and using coin analytics and hoping you don’t get cheated. This opens huge new markets for bitcoin payments for everyone. If lightning isn’t successful, miners don’t need to worry about it. If lightning is successful (because of instant payments, micropayments) that means many more users actually need to buy bitcoin. The price increase helps miners even more than the rest of us. To get everyone on the planet one lightning channel each will take 63 years of current bitcoin blocks. Less with coming improvements, but miners can expect at least a couple of decades of generous fees as everyone gets onto lightning. And we recommend everyone get more than two channels. Even once everyone is on lightning, you still need to go on-chain to make a payment when your peer is unreachable. With ten million channels used once a day at 99.99% reliability, we’d expect 1000 on-chain transactions from that alone. In practice, people will want to add more channel capacity, create new channels and remove profits to cold storage: all of these need onchain transactions. After the first few million users, that transaction volume becomes significant. I’m more excited about micropayments becoming a reality, but that’s a topic for a whole other post…