The lightning network is, simply..... underrated.

Imagine being able to send a Satoshi to someone for no fee.

Incase you're not aware, you can't send a Satoshi to someone else. The mining fees would be greater than the Satoshi you want to send, and although you COULD send the Sat over, you'd end up paying over 1 Sat in fees, defeating the whole purpose.

The lightning network can, simply put, be used to transact large amounts of Bitcoin at a very fast rate, and at extremely low fees. It can also be used for tiny transactions, like sending that 1 Sat I spoke about earlier.

So if this is possible, why isn't the lightning network being widely used?

Simply because of two factors: greed and uncertainty

See, to perform transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain, you have to 'block' your transaction(that is, add your transaction to a block on the Blockchain.) And miners would have to 'mine' that block(that is, decrypt the information held in the block to enable the transaction take place)

Miners are rewarded for this in the fees you pay for using the network.

This is also the reason why if your small transaction is added to a block with larger transactions than yours, it may take some time before the miners regard your transaction.

The lightning network tries to change all this.

There are a lot of jargons that could explain what the lightning network is, but in the shortest way, the lightning network is peer to peer transacting of bitcoin.

That is, no miners are involved in the whole process.

The network uses a complexly explained level of overlaying on the bitcoin Blockchain. If you're a bookworm or enthusiast, you could read up on Wikipedia.

That said, back to my two reasons for lack of mass adoption of the lightning network.

First is greed. Most wallet providers make a lot of money from users. Imagine charging 0.0001BTC per transaction. It seems small at first, but if you make one transaction every week for a year,that sums up to 0.0052BTC. Multiply that by 100000 customers(a tiny number for major wallet providers) and that's 520BTC every year, in basically free money. 

They act as your gateway to the blockchain and you pay for it. Simple.

The lightning network would potentially offset this free money every year, and they don't want that.

The second factor is uncertainty. The lightning network, in it's current form is immature and can't handle a lot of load.

It's processing power is a tenth of the regular blockchain, and the support on it isn't that great.

There are some great services like Bottle pay and Sats4likes that run on the network, but their services won't warrant mass adoption.

But you should still care about the lightning network. 

It could be the solution to Bitcoin's scaling problem, and as more and more big bodies like Bitfinex,Binance and KuCoin look more into it's underlying tech, it's easy to see mass adoption soon.

Keep your fingers crossed.

This is just by the way, but if you want to earn bitcoin for watching YouTube videos, click this link. There are no minimum withdrawal limits and you can withdraw to your regular wallet, feeless!