What if Lightning-scaled BTC payments reach mainstream merchant rails?
Lightning-based payment processors hit critical mass at major merchants, giving BTC a genuine medium-of-exchange use case alongside its store-of-value role.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 1–3 years horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a mixed shock. Lightning-based payment processors hit critical mass at major merchants, giving BTC a genuine medium-of-exchange use case alongside its store-of-value role. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Bitcoin ▲ · Crypto confidence ▲ · Crypto liquidity ▲ · Risk appetite ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.