I hope the Core devs will put other "blue sky" stuff on pause for the time being and just roll out a well-tested LN reference library ASAP. A reference library will allow independent developers to build their own LN apps/businesses. I think a lot of the crypto capital is getting sucked into ICOs right now but it only takes one visionary to see that a LN payment processor + secure LN client has virtually unlimited demand (hence, massive ROI).

To be fair it is not like they are building something that was done before. It might be hard to estimate how long it will take to test all the bugs and everything.
All I know is that these guys have been developing a client for it https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd and that they updated the ReadMe file to check the last box for "Lightning Network Specification Compliance". I hope it comes soon, but there really isn't any information out there. Your best bet would be to go to one of the developers twitter and ask him there.

Someone asked a similar question on the lightning-dev mailing list, apparently the different teams independently implementing their own software based on the Lightning protocol are now at a fairly late stage of their development paths: testing the interoperation of their separate Lightning implementations. How long that takes is down to them though. Maybe someone will do a launch in Q1 2018? Not sure tbh.

Thanks for that info.

The reason for my post is that I have stumbled across quotes from key Bitcoin people along the lines that "payment processing is just one part of Bitcoin, so people are freaking out for no good reason." I hope this is not a widespread view within Bitcoin devs (whether Core or others). While Bitcoin can and will do more than just payment processing, payment processing is, indeed, Bitcoin's killer app today. Reading between the lines, I think that Satoshi envisioned a potentially long runway for Bitcoin but adoption is growing much faster than I think anyone could have realistically anticipated in 2009. That means that the key people who are guiding development of key features of Bitcoin need to think more like a finance startup and less like a space research agency - get it done yesterday and the customer is always right! The risk of being non-competitive is that Bitcoin could get swamped out of the market by an inferior (as measured in terms of Bitcoin's core principles) but more heavily capitalized competitor. While BCH is not yet a serious threat in this regard, it is a living demonstration of the dynamic that is at play, here. With growing adoption, Bitcoin is no longer just a technology, it is a social/economic phenomenon. It is in the nature of market competition that only the fittest survive, no matter how good the technology the non-fittest were using.

Good to hear that things are coming along nicely. We have segwit now (since august) so in theory we would be able to implement Lightning network in a couple of months when it's completely finished and tested. Now that's great but in order to get it locked in and activated we would need consensus right? So would we have to go through a similar process like the process with segwit (1x)? Surely it can't be implemented straight away before getting approvement from miners, nodes and the community in general.

LOL.

Thank you, I edited my post 

Please no.

Leave "move fast and break things" to the snapchats and instagrams of the world. You don't want to apply these principles to an immutable ledger that moves billions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency each day. Any competitive edge that is gained by accumulating technical debt will break your neck sooner or later, even moreso with technologies such as Bitcoin.

It's a community effort, not an attempt to make a quick buck by burning venture capital just to get bought up by Google or Facebook further down the road.

Hope it'll have a gui.

The public alpha release Daemon which is a full implementation of Lightning, capable of opening channels with peers, closing channels, completely handling all cooperative and non-cooperative channel states, maintaining a fully authenticated and validated channel graph, performing path finding within the network, passively forwarding incoming payments, and sending outgoing onion-encrypted payments through the network was made on 10 January 2017.

In December 2017 three different entities were working on creating software implementations, ACINQ, Lightning Labs, and Blockstream and in the same month test transactions had been made on the testnet.

18 months ^TM