But Lightning bears no resemblance to the Bitcoin I signed up to work on 5 years ago. It's an entirely different design which looks very much like the existing model of banking - nodes that hold people's money (i.e. may end up regulated), route it between them, no support for smart contracts, byzantine complexity due to being built on a 'legacy' layer that wasn't designed for it, occasional settlement between parties etc. Assuming it even works at all.
This type of blowup is so common in open source software that its a bit eye roll inducing. Basically as a project becomes more popular it attracts better talent who eventually start stripping out the early contributors crappy but working code and shooting down their ideas. They feel unappreciated and claim 'This isn't the ____ that I used to love!!' and then vanish.
Good for him though if they offered him a ton of money for some banking system shit. You can't expect people to just wait around 10+ years hoping bitcoin takes off and they never have to work again. I just hope his project fails miserably
