Big day for bitcoin, Lightning goes live on mainnet! ⚡ 

Announcing the first Lightning beta release for the live bitcoin network, lnd 0.4. Read about it here: https://blog.lightning.engineering/announcement/2018/03/15/lnd-

If the other party don't want to cheat on you and close the channel with the latest confirmed transaction, everything is fine.
The problems start if the other party close the channel with an old version of the transaction (where you get less coins than with the latest transaction) and you are offline. In this case you could lose coins..
If you are online and see this, you have the possibility to post a transaction where you can grab the coins of the other party.

Just an example:
Initial channel balance is 1 BTC from you and 1 BTC from the other party.
Then a transaction happens from the other party to you. Say you receive 0.2 BTC.
The current status of the channel (latest confirmed transaction) is 1.2 BTC for you, 0.8 BTC for the other side.

If the other party is closing the channel with the first transaction where he closes it with 1 BTC for him and you don't see it, he would be able to steal you those 0.2 BTC.
If you would be online and you recognize it, you could post a transaction (only then) to get the full 2 BTC from the channel.

This means, there is an incentive that all parties play fair and only post the last confirmed transaction and don't cheat. If someone cheats, and the other party see it, this party could then get the whole balance of the transaction and the cheater get nothing. That's the only reason why the lightning network works without trust on the other party.

Don't expect this to have any positive effect on bitcoin prices. Most people not in the crypto community won't hear about it for months or possibly years. Most in the non-crypto world have yet even to hear of SegWit -- when Coinbase announced its own SegWit implementation, the community was dancing in the streets. And around the world the bitcoin price promptly crashed.

Are you serious? Segwit is being adopted widely by many users these days including myself since more and more people are recognizing the significance of this revolutionary technology and I am expecting it to go mainstream by the end of this year. The lightning network is something which many members of the crypto community have been waiting for anxiously and this will definitely help in triggering a bullish market and will spark a huge rally by the king of the crypto market and other popular altcoins like Ethereum, Ripple, Litecoin etc. This is my optimistic view regarding this feature.