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> If they decide they want to buy from random website Z one day, making a lightning network connection between themselves and that website will be useless because establishing a lightning network connection needs to go on the regular slow block chain, so it'll take as long as a regular payment.

The "network" part of lightning network allows you to make a payment to anyone else on the network (trustlessly) through multiple hops. For example, if you opened a channel with a friend, and your friend had a channel open with Starbucks, you would be able to pay Starbucks through your friend without having to trust your friend.

And this works today. I have one channel open on the lightning network, and regularly make payments to random nodes on the network. I pay << $0.01 in fees for these transactions, and they settle in ~a second.

So what happens if you aren't linked even indirectly?

What if the trust chain is 20 users long?

Who's going to spend the resources to find this chain? And has it been tested to scale, or is it just like Bitcoin in the early days where people said it would scale and never tested it?

People are going to gravitate to putting all their money into a large exchange like Coinbase to avoid these problems.

There is no trust chain. You have no idea how lightning works.

Every hop only knows the previous and next one, nothing else, not even the length of the chain.

Your computer/phone finds the route and if you’re ok with privacy trade off you can outsource this task to your hub for a fee in single satoshis.

People are going to gravitate towards convenient solutions making all sorts of security, privacy and financial risks, that’s why it’s important to have multiple alternatives with different trade offs.

There is a trust chain. If there was 0 trust involved then you could pick random nodes instead of needing to find a specific path. Sure there's cryptographic trickery involved so it is harder to steal the money, but it can still happen.

Large centralized lightning nodes will form and they will act like banks and be able to stop payments to arbitrary entities like Paypal, and even make the payment get stuck for days or weeks depending on how long the timeout is.

From the paper itself.

"the network will look a lot like the correspondent banking network"

No, you’re flat out wrong. There is no trust and it’s impossible to steal money.

You need to find a path because path needs to have channel capacity required for your transaction, that’s why you can’t pick random nodes, not because you want to trust them.

Stealing somebody’s funds from channel is just as hard as stealing bitcoin - you need to crack encryption or you need a private key.

You have no idea how lightning works, please do some reading before making incorrect claims.

Nope, you are just echoing the basic understanding of the tech that is on every bitcoin propaganda outlet.

Each node can still steal money from the node next to them by turning hostile such as not passing the secret and closing out their channel and getting time locks to expire, which is many magnitudes easier than cracking encryption or stealing a private key. The network has already been DDoSed. Now imagine the incentive to do it when it handles millions of dollars.

Not passing the secret means not spending the output in HTLC, which will then be claimed back by sender due to timeout.

You can unlock your HTLC without telling the other party the secret. You just close the channel by yourself and tell everyone else the secret and then ddosing so the other party can't redeem his HTLC before his HTLC expires.

> You can unlock your HTLC without telling the other party the secret. You just close the channel by yourself and tell everyone else the secret

Do you not see the contradiction in your statement? You can’t spend your htlc without revealing the secret to the other party. If your stealing procedure involves ddosing random unknown party from being able to access any internet whatsoever to lock them out of minuscule amounts lightning payments are used for - good luck with that.

Nope there is no contradiction. Again you haven't really thought about how this works. You are guaranteed to know who sent you your HTLC because the payment is settled through the channel. You cannot cloak this in any way.

You only need to ddos the lightning network so it won't record their HTLC when it expires. There is no need to ddos them, though I would argue it would be equally easy to do. And so while the other party will eventually see the secret on the block chain, they can't get their HTLC unlocked on the network before it expires.

And the lightning network has already been easily ddosed! We will see it happen more often if the lightning network ever gets bigger. This isn't some hypothetical situation.

> ddos the lightning network so it won't record their HTLC when it expires

this is not even a thing. lightning network is collection of independent nodes, there is no registry of payments and channels, every node keeps their own record.

> And so while the other party will eventually see the secret on the block chain, they can't get their HTLC unlocked on the network before it expires.

why? if a party is stuck in a payment and especially if they notice they are getting attacked - they will take steps to mitigate. the moment commitment with secret is broadcast and in the worst case - the moment it gets confirmed on chain the other party will know the secret and can unlock their htlc. the risk is essentially the same as with deep reorgs - very low because those are very rare events. and the hassle is most definitely not worth the value of a stolen micropayment, which is the primary purpose of LN.

Okay, but the lightning network is not just "here's all my money, please don't run off". There's crypto around it, a multisig protocol designed to prevent exactly that, no?

If it was just some crap exchange, why would anyone be bothering, and especially why would it be taking so long?

Um no, you deposit all your bitcoin into Coinbase's bitcoin wallet so there's no crypto enforcement that you own the bitcoin anymore. That's the only way Coinbase can safely use your bitcoin on their lightning network connections.

They need to commit regular bitcoin into a lightning network channel on the main blockchain before they can spend it.

That's not lightning. That's just how exchanges work now.

That is how exchanges have always worked, but the lightning network encourages people to use centralized exchanges that already have lightning network channels between all other exchanges and sellers so they don't have to waste time committing unknown amounts of bitcoins between 100+ vendors.

It doesn't work that way. If Coinbase operates a Lightning node, you simply open a channel to their node, from your Lightning wallet. You don't give Coinbase your money.