The Lightning Network is specifically designed to work around bitcoin design flaws. It entirely sidesteps the chain for a big part of the process. To me it proves that Satoshi did not, in fact, think of everything. Not the other way around.
Lightning has mostly done this by being a lot more centralized in practice and one could argue... What's the point of it all in this case? Why not just use regular currency?
Sorry, I do not understand your comment. Can you clarify. What does "a lot more centralized in practice" mean?
> What's the point of it all in this case?
Lightning is an L2 protocol, highly scalable and used for low cost payment in Bitcoin. Level 1 networks are almost never used for user transactions: your credit card payments do not go over fedwire, etc. Bitcoin protocol is not scalable to serve worldwide money transfer needs; Lightning is. And with the cost of a penny per transaction or so.
> Why not just use regular currency?
There are a lot of frictions in the current banking systems, because money laundering, because drugs, because whatever. Getting $5-$10k in regular currency while on an overseas trip can be a major quest. With Lightning I can transfer that much (or more) in a few mouse clicks.
As a side note, I think the federales are already way too nosy regarding my use of my own money, so I want to give alternative options as much business as I can. My 2c.
Isn't it hard to use in practice? Liveness, inbound liquidity, moving funds between L1 and L2, don't all of those lead to massive use of hubs, this denying the entire premise of decentralization?
Very easy. If the merchant supports it, it is extremely easy; equivalent to pointing your phone at a reader to pay with GooglePay. Between people -- a QR or similar.
Sorry, and no offense intended, but can you be clearer? What exactly is your main concern that you allude to above? And how, in your view, the Lightning compares with the alternatives in that specific regards?
Most people who use Lightning do not operate their own nodes; same as with other payment methods -- credit card users do not operate their own payment networks, people writing checks do not operate their own banks, etc.
It feels like we are talking across each other and I just do not get it.
My point is that for legitimate payment uses Lightning (and all current cryptocurrencies) are useless. They were sold as the "democratization of finance" that will "help the world's poorest" and they either:
1. can't allow an single village to operate purely on them, because they're too slow
2. or they're not decentralized, and the entire "democratic" angle dies with that
And then what's the point of cryptocurrencies for most people? Why not just use the "tradfi" and "fiat currencies" and use the money propping up cryptocurrencies to actually make the world a better place?
If we shut down all current cryptocurrencies and diverted resources used to actual productive uses, the world would probably end up with a net gain.
I'm just ranting. I would want cryptocurrencies to be amazing but right now they seem useful for people with cyberpunks fetishes, for criminals, and rarely, for actual regular people from fragile states (not rich people trying to exfiltrate wealth).
> what's the point of cryptocurrencies for most people? Why not just use the "tradfi" and "fiat currencies"
Maybe because otherwise for a significant portion of the world population their own fiat is the only game in town. And it sucks so much that the regular people are willing to break laws and risk fines, confiscations and occasionally prison just for keeping their savings in anything else, like a neighbor country fiat. Their govvies use their fiat as a transfer mechanism (which makes saving impossible) and thus must discourage any other savings vehicle; otherwise no fool will use their fiat.
I saw fiat rug pull twice in my first 25 years: once as an instant nationalization (a friendly radio announcement one night that your money is ... well ... not a money anymore) and, later, a hyperinflation that over 2 years wiped out savings. And being found with a less sucky fiat at home meant jail.
I was just a kid, did not have any savings and thus did not care that much. But an older generation lost everything. So yes, a lot of people will gladly use anonymous, permissionless money, drawdowns and other warts included.
>Level 1 networks are almost never used for user transactions: your credit card payments do not go over fedwire, etc.
Fedwire isn't a "level 1 network", it's an entirely different service with different end users and goals in mind. ACH isn't an "L2 protocol", but does orders of magnitude more transactions per second than Bitcoin.
It's like cryptobros don't understand the basics of the systems they're attempting to replace.
> it takes less than one second to go through
Like Bitcoin used to be before someone had the brilliant idea of destroy the possibility of zero-confirmation transactions on-chain with Replace-by-fee transactions
One is a quick summary of the current balance in a channel. A new transaction is created each time the balance in the channel changes. It's somewhat cheap to put on the blockchain (And the main saving is that you only need to post the final update when you close the channel), but venerable to one side putting an old stale transaction onto the blockchain to profit.
The other transaction forms a chain of proof for current state, invalidating previous balance update transactions. It's somewhat expensive to post, as it will pull in the whole history.
Both peers need to continually watch the chain (or contract a 3rd party to watch) to make sure the other peer isn't cheating by posted a stale balance transaction. These special transactions are time locked, so once one is posted, you have like 24 hours to post the proof transaction and reverse it.
> Except people wanting to do more than 15 transactions a minute
It's more like 7 transactions per second, which is still absolute crap, but that was after the original Bitcoin project was kidnapped. There aren't such limitations in the original Bitcoin (forked as Bitcoin Cash)
> Or that to scale everyone would need to store a petabyte size blockchain
That is addressed in the whitepaper (SPVs and pruning)
