People are getting too fixated on Lightning in terms of the roadmap for Core development. Lightning is not all there is in Bitcoin. What about stateless vaults? What about statechains? What about decentralizing mining pools again?

Lightning is certainly one of the biggest things being built on top of Bitcoin right now, but that should not make it the only priority in terms of base layer protocol design. That is incredibly myopic and naive thinking.

Lightning needs to succeed, but so do many other things.

People seem to be falling into a mental trap that Lightning is all that is needed for Bitcoin scaling and should be prioritized at the base layer.

What about statechains? This has the potential to take federated systems and give users a default exit that can't be blocked.

What about vaults? Even with all the progress and improvements to Lightning many of the most popular apps to use them are custodial. Should the potential of giving custodians more secure ways to handle users' funds be overlooked? That denies the reality people will use them.

What about decentralized mining pools? Should we just continue LARPing about how "you can just spin up new pools" and ignore the reality of the security competency and management competency necessary to run them reliably? How many people can "just spin them up?"

Lightning is very important, but it is not the end all of Bitcoin. What's the logic of second layers again... "If one fails that doesn't affect the base layer?"

Well what if the entire base layer development is steered by ONE second layer? That stagnates other potential ones.

Everyone is starting to get way too short sighted and cliquey in terms of looking at the future of Bitcoin development, and Bitcoin in general.

Lightning is not Bitcoin, it's an extension of Bitcoin, and not the only one or only possible one.

If Bitcoin development continues moving in this direction, then frankly Bitcoin's overall potential is going to be largely wasted due to narrow minded thinking and premature stagnation as people fixate on tiny sub sections of the whole.

There is so much more to what can be built on top of Bitcoin than Lightning, and the more Bitcoiners' lose sight of this the greater the odds are that Bitcoin does not truly become what it can be, rather it becomes a crippled and stunted shadow of it.