Help anyone can advise.

it's a sticking plaster and many people are saying that it will involve brokers that need to lend out the cash so the extra speed
will end up being a service that you end up paying for.

Time for a major re-write of the whole system and dumping the block-chain before it becomes any bigger if you ask
me because it's already at 200gb and to work out what wallet contains what balance you have to scan the whole darn
thing and everything I have seen with the software so far stinks of being bloated, over complicated and designed to
eat up CPU power.

Transactions per second
BTC=7
ETH=15
IOTA =100 (Tangle)
VISA =25,000 (Semi-Centralized

Come on when did we start pricing bandwidth and processing in bytes and end up having to pay $50 for about 250 bytes to be recorded
just so the public could see the data, not that they can really understand whats going on.

They say these coins are worth something because of the processing power that is used so who's going to get me some money
if i write a program to count all the black pixels in all the images I can get from google images if I search for the term "Dead Ducks"
NO ONE RIGHT!

The damage from the fees will already had been done in a few months and lots of people will had jumped ship by then
and Bitcoin was about being decentralized and not having ten big names doing 90% of mining and transactions like we
have today.

We seem to have a cancer in the system that needs to be cut out but i guess this is all part of the learning process and then lets
see what these brokers and miners do with all that hardware they have going spare.

Internal war we can do without

there's no ETA. we've only just seen the first mainnet LN transactions on the network in the last few weeks because the network specs were just agreed on recently. there are significant bugs being worked out on the testnet.

LN developers were recently quoted as saying they are "not going to rush anything" since there will be so much money on the line once LN launches. they are very concerned about funds being lost due to corner cases they haven't discovered yet.

i think we'll see public use of LN sometime in 2018....but that could be 12 months from now.

Why are the exchanges against it?

Probably in 2 years if the core get their shit together

Can someone please remind me what are the specs of Lightning Network update and how does the specs compare to VISA and Mastercard specs?  

What was Visa and Mastercard specs at first release decades ago?

Yeah aren't we all waiting for Lightning Network update. It has to be released otherwise bitcoin cash will win.

Will miners be against Lightning network? Who else will be against Lightning network?

I’m curious as to whether there is an official thread to follow for the production updates for the Lightning Network. There was an article about BitRefill successfully using LN to confirm a transaction which was done INSTANTLY with no fees. How were they able to do this outside of a testnet environment?

It’s been a few months since the rise of transaction fees for the bitcoin core network, and I think it’s safe to say that most people won’t mind the high fees if they knew that a solution like LN was on the way. We just need to ensure that most laymen know that it’s coming, and what to do to prepare themselves for making sure that they are knowledgeable in what to expect for the network to operate smoothly.

Does anyone care to start a self-moderated megathread with updates about the Lightning Network that will only carry relevant discussion and news regarding LN?

SegWit was released months ago, but few are those using it right now. People need tome to accept new changes.
The Lightning Network will solve all users problems , its implementation will be faster.
The problem is that the majority of users are just byuing Bitcoin and holding and not using in a daily basis, that's why they don't care much about fees and slow transactions.