exactly. your getting it..
however i can see hubs not agreeing to lose out on earning by rounding down. which is (before carlton butted in) the point i was making.
that LN has many flaws and needs to address many things to fix many bugs, remove many opportunities of abuse, etc etc

i think using millisats is opening a big can of worms of possible issues, compared to just handling satoshis, to emulate bitcoin and allow signing and settling to happen more fluid

I said I understand it like the way franky1 does. So I speculate that what will happen could be the same, only to some extent, of how the banking system was started in Italy by the Medici clan. I was only trying to say that history is repeating itself.


Again you misunderstand the point I am trying to convey. I was using the bank example just to make a point. This is Bitcoin, it is a different scenario. But that does not mean that certain individuals or group of individuals will not pool their resources together to create a large payment hub or a group of large payment hubs interconnecting with each other.


I do not deny that. I have to mention again that I was merely speculating on what could happen. I mean no harm. If you must know, I am for core, for smaller blocks and support off chain transactions.


You do not know that. Individuals can group together to serve their own agenda and self interests. Just like in Bitcoin's cartelization of mining, a cartelization of payment hubs is possible.

Reality knows it. If the barrier to enter the market is identically low for everyone, a monopoly is literally impossible. Mining isn't like that post-ASIC, but the only hardware needed to run a Lightning hub is going to be general purpose.

Right. Some balance between "big & liquid" and "small & independent" will arise, and I shouldn't wonder that the LN protocol designers have had this balance in mind when working on it.



Think about it in comparison to electronic fiat processors; we have less than a dozen major payment systems, and a typical consumer will not necessarily get to choose from them all. Despite that, and despite healthy profit at the payment processors, the fees aren't extortionate.

Now, remember what it is that allowed these companies onto the marketplace in the first: heavy licensing regimes. Innovative tech? Clever new business structure? Tough luck, unless you can get a licence, you're any other bum on the street (working for the companies who you could have competed against is your only option).



With Lightning, there is no licence. That means that the natural limit to the size of the Hub market will be what dictates how many Hubs there are, not an artificial limit. In practice, that means any business owner with their own premises is going to give this a go, and the natural dynamics of the clearance system will determine how successful Hubs are distributed, not political decisions.

This could manifest itself in a much more complicated way than simply VISA, PayPal or UnionPay. Depending on the state of the Bitcoin ledger at any point in time, no Hub could consistently always be the cheapest option. The Hub would have to be routing every single other payment in the ledger in order to be able to offer the most efficient routing and in turn the cheapest price.... unless they were the only Hub.... where they would lose incentive to be cheapest anyway... it's a free-market paradox, essentially.

I have another concern about the Lightning Network. In the beginning there might only be a small portion of of Bitcoin users that will start using it. Will this not cause a problem in the fungibility of BTC? There might be a scenario where the price of Bitcoins outside LN will be higher than the coins "trapped" or "hindered" in LN. So it might create another market for LN Bitcoins versus "real" Bitcoins. What do you think?