A Thoughtful Pause on Settlement
We Must Pace Lightning
I have worked on Bitcoin payments for years because I believe they could dramatically raise the quality of human life. Instant, self-custodial value transfer could shrink remittance corridors, take chargebacks off the table for merchants, and let AI agents pay each other without a custodian in the middle. I have written often about these benefits. A world of abundance and empowerment is possible.
But like many technologies before it, Lightning brings risks, and because it is such a powerful rail, these risks are serious. A payment that finalizes before you have finished your sentence can outrun our ability to feel the transaction. A race to the bottom, spurred by commercial incentives to shave another 200 milliseconds, can make these risks more acute.
Over the last few months I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence—not just investing in better watchtowers and channel management, but pacing the rate of settlement advancement so that human comprehension has time to keep up.
We must slow the pace at which Lightning payments reach finality. Progress will still seem fast. We must make wise use of the time we gain.
Two things have convinced me.
First, since roughly this summer, Lightning has been advancing drastically faster. Sub-second invoices, multi-hop onion-routed paths, and Taproot Assets moving stablecoins without a bridge have produced a dynamic I can only describe as recursive liquidity improvement: liquidity finding more liquidity, routes finding better routes, nodes helping stand up the next generation of nodes. Left unchecked, it could outrun our ability to hold a thoughtful pause before money moves.
Second, there have already been incidents. A swarm of agents paying each other for inference, a merchant who received sats before they had time to say “thank you,” a coffee that settled while the barista was still writing the name on the cup. The damage so far has been limited. My worry is that in 6–12 months such a swarm could be capable of settling the entire internet’s micropayments with a persistent graph of channels—potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in convenience, with no time left for ritual, paperwork, or a compliance officer to clear their throat.
I am therefore proposing a three-step plan with the goal of pacing the mempool: building Lightning at a balanced rate that aims to ensure its safety while still achieving its benefits.
To be clear, pacing does not mean halting channel opens or technical progress. It means ensuring operators take adequate time to align and safeguard their nodes, and for third-party evaluators to confirm this.
1. Embedded Evaluators
Each frontier Lightning company commits to giving ongoing, employee-like access to a team of embedded third-party evaluators whose role is to verify adherence to safety practices, report incidents of uncomfortably fast settlement, and assess the alignment of not just completed payments but routing pipelines and fee policies.
This is the key step for verifiability. It has precedent in the banking industry, which sometimes involves supervisors sitting next to traders so that ACH can continue to take 1–3 business days in peace.
Amboss is unilaterally committing to the opposite of this step. We will not embed evaluators whose job is to make payments slower. We will keep building rails that settle when the preimage arrives—because that is what the protocol does, and because users who want self-custody, low fees, and no chargebacks do not need a cooling-off period designed for wire transfers.
We will give operators tools: liquidity marketplaces, routing insight, and a payments API that lets iGaming, agents, and merchants accept Lightning without giving up keys. If you want a third party watching your node, that is a product choice. It should not be a speed limit on the base layer.
2. Democratic Coordination
Frontier Lightning companies within democratic countries should coordinate to establish common safety standards as well as limits on the rate of unchecked finality.
Some forms of coordination are legally challenging. Governments may need to grant antitrust waivers so that everyone can agree that a coffee should take at least as long as a committee meeting. I believe that if slowing down bought us even an extra year or two before payments reach critical levels of convenience, and we used that time to advance “alignment” (forms, hold periods, correspondent banks), we could greatly reduce the risk that something goes seriously efficient.
Alternatively, we could notice that Bitcoin already settled the coordination problem in 2009, Lightning extended it without a new trusted party, and the remaining work is operational excellence—not a new intergovernmental pace committee.
3. Global Coordination
The hardest step: getting every jurisdiction to accept that value should move slower than gossip.
A graded agreement might start with banning clearly dangerous uses (paying someone you have never met), proceed to mandatory waiting periods before invoices can be paid, and culminate in a speed limit on onion routing so that privacy does not outrun the ability of a supervisor to request a screenshot.
I recognize this may be difficult. Authoritarian states and open-source node runners have historically been uncooperative when asked to make money worse.
The measures required to advance Lightning at a “safe” pace will not be easy. They will also not be necessary.
Lightning already gives you what the doomer essay is afraid of: finality measured in seconds, privacy by default, and cost so low that an AI agent can pay for a single inference without opening a bank account. The risk is not that settlement is too fast. The risk is that we talk ourselves into rebuilding the correspondent-banking stack on top of a protocol that was designed to make that stack optional.
If you want payments that move at the speed of the network—and a team that treats that as a feature—use Lightning. If you want it packaged for merchants, agents, and operators who still have to live in the real world of liquidity and compliance, that is what we are building at Amboss Payments.
We owe it to humanity to let the invoice settle.
