As usual when this tired counter-argument is made, you aren't considering alternative solutions (cryptocurrencies) that are already working with Consensus algorithms like (variants of) Proof of Stake...

Forget Bitcoin, Lightning Network was announced years ago and it's still far from being used in production. Also this doesn't solve the Proof of Work problem Bitcoin has, the higher its value the more energy is used, a second layer solution isn't going to fix this issue, it's only increasing throughput.

Since developers of Bitcoin are extremely conservative and censoring, I doubt Bitcoin is going anywhere in the mid to far future. Other projects are just faster and can potentially deliver their promises.

PoS is far from being perfect and has it's own sets of issues (ex: rich gets richer, hackers that end up getting large sums of coin now also have control over the network, custodians also have large control, etc).

> Forget Bitcoin, Lightning Network was announced years ago and it's still far from being used in production.

It is being used in production with growing adoption (1ml.com) and it is what they are using in El Salvador.

> Since developers of Bitcoin are extremely conservative and censoring

It's a decentralized network where nobody controls it, developers can't push changes willy-nilly. Bitcoin isn't trying to be everything to everyone and that's ok. You can have other layers and projects which enable these fast moving ideas (most of them are going to be deprecated sooner or later because they'll turn out to be bad ideas anyways). Once these projects prove it works, Bitcoin can incorporate them. Most of these projects that are faster sacrifice decentralization to a certain extent and if we didn't care about decentralization, then why even bother with crypto, we already have Paypal/Visa/etc.

Is the Lightning Network ready and 100% rolled out? When will it be ready? Which energy consumption numbers were incorrect in your parent comment?

> Cryptocurrency is a genie out of a bottle

That might be true, but that doesn't mean that criticism of Bitcoin (which is only one of the crypto currencies) is not valid.

There is still active development, but https://strike.me uses the lightning network. There are several other apps built on top of the lightning network.

I use the lightning network almost every day listening to podcasts with the Breeze app https://breez.technology/

> Which energy consumption numbers were incorrect in your parent comment?

The number of transactions per second of Bitcoin, as it can handle many if you include lightning

And what about the answers to the two questions leading up to that one?

I'm not sure how to answer those, what exactly is the question? The lightning network is live, you can use it now.

If I'm buying BTC for 2000 dollars today, will I use the lightning network?

What?

Hasn't Lightning been in the works for 4+ years? Is it actually progressing towards usability? I remember hearing about it during the 2017 speculation frenzy and block size controversies, when people raised the exact same concerns about Bitcoin transactions being slow, expensive, and carbon-intensive.

It is fully functional with growing adoption (1ml.com), you can try some of the lightning wallets available (https://lightningnetworkstores.com/wallets, personally I'd recommend Phoenix Wallet).

El Salvador is more or less adopting the Lightning Network as a way to enable Bitcoin as legal tender in its borders.