LN does not help. It harms original Bitcoin

https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/5080565.msg48966290#msg48966290

Truely, I think there is nobody who knows what to do with Lighting. Nowadays, when decentral and open source technologies are widespread, Lighting developers are moving completely in a non-transparent manner.

because LN is not involved with blockchains for the actual LN payments. its pretty much just human agreement.
humans can agree on receiving coin A for coin B. by just signing LN payments of such.

infact you can do that now without LN. without vaulting up coins

heres the funny part. some say bitcoin has issues and needs LN because bitcoin full nodes dont like the blockchain..
but guess what. LN will start having fullnodes (for factories) that monitor multiple coins. its funny because if a node is supposedly unable to handle 1 chain, but suddenly able to handle 2-4 chains... then obviously the argument against the 1 chain is an empty argument

its not about jumping blocksize from small to large over night.
its not about taking a decade to convince a dev to implement just a small teaser amount
its about progressive growth over time without needing devs to decide when
EG the block mining difficulty shifts depending on block events. without needing devs to decide what the difficulty should shift to

also leaning transactions down. some devs want to blot up transactions with lots of features and even have it where a block can be allowed to be filled with just 5 bloated transactions. bitcoin should be made more simplified.
if users want complicated privacy contract stuff, then they can use other networks but if bitcoin wants to be a straight forward digital cash, then keep it as simple as digital cash

actually
maximum weight is 4mb but there is a secondary limit of maximum weight witness scalefactor(4)
meaning there is a limit within the code of 1mb

this 1mb limit is a pre-requisite for transactions
it is where legacy transactions have been restricted to only be within.
and segwit transactions are semi restricted to being within.

segwit transactions do not get full free reign of 4mb. part of a segwit transaction is restricted to the 1mb limit
its only the signatures of a segwit transaction that get to sit outside the 1mb limit
so an average segwit transaction where signatures = half the data of a transaction would result in ~2mb blocks
but this is in a usecase of if every transaction in the 1mb base limit was segwit and where half the transaction data was its signature
EG
if the majority of transactions were legacy then only a few segwits would have their signatures outside the 1mb area
meaning expect less than 2x

so dont expect transactions to fill up the 4mb weight as a 'norm' .. as the 1mb area is still a pre-requisite and restricts full utility.

I think it does. Though i havent tried and saw only in theory it can be possible to be more scalable than the current or applied system. Ofcourse this has to be tested more often and in many scenario. Its still better than to stick to the slower ones.

to use LN is atleast 1 deposit to vault funds up on the bitcoin network before even getting to play with LN and atleast one to unvault funds when finished playing around on LN(vaulting up with a factory to let the factory then handle the channel open/close management)
if you only plan on budgeting your money for 2 payments then its not worth it.

if you plan to avoid factories. you will end up needing to spread funds over multiple channels manually yourself. this can end up being more than 2 transactions onchain (atleast one(with multiple outputs) to vault up.. or.. multiple transactions of single outputs if opening channels at different times) and then multiple transactions to unvault the funds.

they say average users end up needing atleast 5 channels that have their funds spread out to atleast have a relatively good chance to spend some of the funds when needed) so thats like a minimum of 6 transactions onchain.

so if you are only budgeting to use LN for 6 payments.. its not worth it.

VISAUSA statistics have people that only use visa cards ~42 times a month (~1.5 tx a day) but bitcoin is not as widly available as visa. so people wont be spending as often. so lets say only 2 times a week.
so unless your planning ahead your spending habits for the next 3 weeks. again not worth it

LN's niche are for the spammers (day traders, mixers and those who do make regular payments to certain recipients)
it wont really have good utility for those that only want to buy groceries once a week or pay a monthly bill.. (unless they plan to vault up enough funds for 2-6months..

but as my previous posts suggest unless bitcoins network expands the transactions per day restrictions. expect to have to preplan funding a LN deposit for upto a years worth, once things get busier (which not many would want to do)

..
as for saying its instant..
thats if:
1. everyone on the route is online to agree
2. everyone on the route is funded enough
3. others havnt raided your channel of said route before you got to spend it yourself

im not the one who shouts out LN can handle visa global levels.
i actually downplayed the numbers to be just visa USA as a more plausable usecase for if its popular


so you have to start playing the numbers that if in lets say 5 years there becomes 189m(not drastic numbers) that before that 5th year we need to have progressed step by step up to that number. which means not waiting for 5 years and then suddenly reacting. (so far devs have made us wait 3 year and tx counts are not much better than 3 years ago (200k a day december 2015))

but one thing to take into account is that even if you think next month only 100,000 vault up. then the following month 200,000 vault up, you actually find out 100,000 from first month are unvaulting and revaulting. so thats 400,000 at month 2
then at third month 300,000 new users.. along with the 300.000 of previous months unvaulting and revaulting.. is 600.000
and so on.
its either going to hit a snag of bottleneck delays if things dont start progressing on the bitcoin main net. or people just dont bother with bitcoin because others might progress because bitcoin devs prefer slowing down bitcoin mainnet utility while raising cost

any to answer thee other point
also im not the one that shouts "gigabytes by midnight" in regards to bitcoins utility.


i am the on that is actually saying lets grow the onchain transaction count limitation progressively.. but the thing that infuriates many people is that a certain dev team want to be a decision maker of when and how..
it could be done so easily (like how difficulty adjusts based on certain parameters of blocks automatically, without needing dev intervention/delay/stall tactics
the network could grow more naturally and automatically without the "dev control" frustration

Lightning Network Compared to any Exchange that allows offchain Swaps

LN                                                                Exchange
Time Delay on Withdrawal to blockchain          FAST Withdrawal to blockchain
Requires Complex LN setups                           No additional setup required
Price increases per hop                                   Low Price if any
Multiple LN hubs needed                                 No additional exchanges required
Only works with Segwit coins                          Works with Any Coin on Exchange
Limited Transaction Amounts                          Unlimited Transaction Amounts
Must use LN hubs                                           Can be used by any exchange user

LN network was never needed as it is nothing more than a 3rd party service, that works with multiple segwit coins.
The nonsense that increasing blocksize or a faster block speed would not increase scaling , is a myth used to pacify fools. 
In any event , exchanges can outperform LN offchain processing and do it cheaper than LN weak design requiring multiple hops.


  

Sure. This is due to the poor change and expectation management done in core that just does not fit to global fin tech standards and only loves the store of value speculation feature left.

to answer this question you have to go ahead and start using lightning network yourself and see how it is doing considering scaling. just ignore the hardness of using it for the first time since it is new and you will get your answer.

i have a feeling that it is the same as when we all heard about bitcoin. at first there were two groups, one hyping it up a lot saying it will replace fiat and another group saying it is a scam pyramid scheme. as soon as we started opening up our own eyes and seeing facts we saw how awesome bitcoin is and saw what it offers and what it doesn't offer.