How is this a con? Once your connected to lightning, optimally you'd want to keep all/most of your hot wallet funds if adoption is high. Your funds are not trapped either, so it's essentially the same as keeping it in your wallet.


To expand on this: Low fees, non existent fees or negative fees (if your transaction helps rebalance channels).


I don't think "low" is a good enough word - Lightning transactions happen in seconds, or near instant. Another pro is that there are no double spends.

I´ll add a few:

Pros:

• (re)enables certain use cases (e.g. micropayments, cheap subscription models, sub-satoshi payments)
• potential increase in privacy, because the huge amount of transactions using the LN that is to be expected will be harder
  to analyze than transactions on the BTC main blockchain
• no forced expiry of a channel, you basically can keep it open forever if all parties agree, which saves fees for funding transactions = great for long-term relationships of parties
• probabilistic payments
  

Cons:

• the possibility of undiscovered bugs (the BTC main blockchain has been battle-tested for nearly a decade and has stood
  the test of time in spite of huge incentives for people with nefarious intentions to find bugs/loopholes, Lightning
  Network is comparatively new)
• If Bitcoin´s main use case is being a censorship-resistant store of value... who needs a Lightning Network?
• some level of monitoring is necessary to prevent people from cheating - this is different on the main blockchain where
  transactions are completely irrevocable (this is compensated by the fact that LN allows no double spends)

Have you played around with some of the already available software?

I don´t think that software like zap is worse than most current Bitcoin wallets:
https://zap.jackmallers.com/


edit: given the fact how many threads in Development & Technical Discussion are related to
the LN, I really think that it deserves its own subforum

It may not matter now that BTC mempool size and fees are almost back to normal:
https://dedi.jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#3m

Agree on the part that it's just a short term occurrence. I see people get excited about how the fees have gone down, where they celebrate it like the 'problem' has almost solved itself, but they completely ignore the fact that the calm market and less network spamming is the direct result of the lower fees. As soon as the market gets active again, the more people will start to get active as well, which will then cause the fees to shoot up to previous highs. Honestly speaking, the most we can expect to happen is off-chain scaling. If there was another viable option, it would have been worked out and implemented already. At least for now we have SegWit to utilize further, which thus far lacks actual usage, but I hope that will change when the next Core client update becomes available.

The theory is that the Lightning Network will be the scaling method that would trigger mass adoption. Many services were waiting for this scaling solution to launch their Bitcoin backed businesses. These businesses would not have been profitable with the previous scaling solution. <High fees & limited scaling>

If you add these new services and the people who would be opening and closing channels to these services, then this will increase the transactions on the Blockchain. Some miners might even run Hubs to supplement their income from normal operations. <Block reward & Miners fees>

Will consider more on a positive side as a end user as people who had to send some fractional btc where just helpless as the fees where way higher than the actual payment and above that you would have to wait for days for the confirmation. Now with this the transaction is getting faster delivered with lower fees so much beneficial thing for the users.

The main advantage that everyone expects naturally is the low cost of bitcoin transactions. For new people, due to high commissions, the importance of bitcoin was lost. People would pay attention to bitcoin cash.

That seems like a false dichotomy.

there are plenty of people who don't hate it but just think it won't work

1) Miners will still receive transaction fees, just not as astronomical ones as in the last 6 months.

2) A Bitcoin blockchain that runs at half capacity will still provide more transaction fees than an alternative blockchain that is barely used at all.

3) To make Bitcoin less secure you'd need an alt that shares its PoW algorithm and is about as profitable as BTC. Where else were miners to go? BCH came close during the hashrate fluctuations caused by its EDA but could never sustain it so far. Keep in mind that unlike other cryptos BTC only competes for ASIC miners, not GPUs.

4) And as sad as it is, but if people cared even remotely about blockchain security 99% of alts would be left in the gutter.

Reducing the hashing power pointed at BTC only makes sense if there's a viable alternative to point it towards to. Otherwise you just have expensive paperweights and lose out on millions of dollars each day. This makes withholding hashing power just for the sake of trying to pull off a 51% attack somewhere later down the road rather unprofitable. And those ASICs are the only machines of potentially doing such an attack. And those ASICs that you would be withholding, will already be obsolete in 10 months' time the latest, so time is playing against you.

Put differently: In practice less hashing power only means less security if there's other hashing power somewhere hidden away that could try to pull of an attack. Bitcoin's hashrate 2014 was much smaller than it is today, yet in practice the network was just as secure.

Miners getting shut down because they are not profitable anymore is a regular part of the process. It's been happening for years every time a new generation of miners hit the market.




I haven't followed BCH's scaling plans, but if they really want to handle 50,000 transactions per seconds using on-chain scaling that would require the equivalent of 7,142 MB blocks per 10 minutes -- or say, 714 MB blocks every minute. Now even assuming they'd manage to compress transactions down to, say 20% in size -- something that BTC could likely also do, if such a solution were to exist -- we'd still be looking at 1,428 MB blocks every 10 minutes. Unless they fundamentally change the way Bitcoin works this is not going to end well.

Of course BCH's scaling approach could turn out to be more viable. And of course that could reflect in price and thus hashrate. Right now, however, BCH is -- by your very own definition -- incredibly insecure. It oscillates at only around 10% of global SHA256 hashrate, making it an easy target for double spend attacks should BTC miners collude and decide to do so. And unless BCH's scaling approach blows BTC's scaling approach out of the water -- which I personally highly doubt -- that won't change anytime soon.