Naturally, the blockchain will have to be hierarchical, or find ways to compact it.
I brought this up with some ethereum devs at one point in a forum a year or two ago, and they addressed the questions pretty openly and graciously, but I still wonder about it. Essentially, they talked about the presumption of branches, subchains, etc. When that happens it seems the system would be a little more complicated than the classic crypto-libertarian currency model.
These chains get pretty large, and the overhead in terms of time and storage space seems well beyond what most people are used to now. Maybe people just have to get used to 15 minute payments, and having an extra drive or computer for financial transactions, as the cost of decentralized finance and economics, but from the current vantage point it seems burdensome to me, and only more so as adoption would grow.
But a transaction to set up a channel needs to hit the chain first. What's the intended workflow for occasionally (once every few weeks) instantaneously ordering pizza via Lightning? Would I have to set up a very long lived channel with my preferred pizza place in advance?
Lightning allows sub-second transactions with finality of settlement for any routable path along a peer-to-peer network of payment channels. Because of the six degrees of Kevin Bacon idea, anyone can pay anyone else on the network with a dozen or so different hops in the worst case, each hop taking a really small fee, like a hundredth of a percent. A true peer-to-peer electronic cash system, if you will.
As in this example, your long-lived channels as an individual are likely to be with your employer or payroll company, your mortgage company, your telco, your favorite restaurants, and other other regular payments you make or sources of income. As an organization your channels will probably be with your suppliers (accounts payable) and major customers (accounts receivable), as well as payroll and office supply companies, etc. But you're able to reach everyone on the network through these starting points. This allows you to do things like proactively "pull" in funds from accounts receivable to cover expenses, by routing through that part of the network. It maps pretty well onto both the individual and corporate use cases.
It also allows micropayment in bitcoin again.. the cost of a payment is basically the cost of maintaining these online routable nodes, and the message communication, which is probably sub-cents in the limit. It's possible you can, e.g., do a 5-cent payment per article view on a news website, or per song played on a future Spotify, etc.
"Full nodes are the most secure way to use Bitcoin, they do not suffer from many attacks that affect lightweight wallets...[a]s explained previously, full nodes enforce the consensus rules no matter what. However, lightweight nodes do not do this."
However I admit much of my assumptions are just from reading the original paper so i'm probably over-simplifying. I guess it would make sense they need some history but not sure why they would need all of it since the previous blocks are confirmed?
Unless I'm missing something something pretty big about how Bitcoin's blockchain works.
There are security features built into each bill that help me establishing if it's legit or not, that I can do myself without third parties.
Banks decide where and when to create this debt so yes, money production is indeed decentralized.
If you’re referring to actual coinage and notes then yes, facilities are indeed centralized, but with electronic debit cards the lines are blurred further
Root node back others networks (think top level domains and delegated subdomains). IMO, it needs to be _very_ expensive to keep minimal blockchain size and avoid spam.