As for lightning, it adds a layer of trust into a system whose reason for existence is trustlessness.
If you don't care about trustlessness, you can already have fast and scalable transactions through normal banking.
I see this repeated a lot. I think you're saying bitcoin is no better than normal banking for moving value.
Do you really believe this? Yes, in the US I can immediately wire money somewhere as long as:
1) I do it within east coast business hours. Weekend? Sorry, wait til Monday 2) I have the correct information for the receiving institution, some of which require a small transfer up front to confirm the setup. 3) My bank actually supports wiring (Wealthfront, for example, only supports ACH transfers which take a few days) 4) I'm sending within the US, otherwise there are a bunch of other complications and requirements
I also need to trust that the bank actually has my money.
With cryptocurrency you can confirm that your stored value exists and is stilled owned by you, and transfer it to anywhere else within 30 minutes, in a provably secure and verifiable way.
Plus the incredible annoyance of having to go through the KYC/AML procedures everywhere to do any kind of meaningful transactions. And still risk getting flagged for fraudulent transactions and possibly having your funds locked/confiscated.
On top of that, you'd also have all the additional risk and liability of dealing with potential fraud and uninsured institutions.
This means transactions have to go unverified and that you have to trust the person you transact with by design.
If an intermediary is not behaving, the worst that can happen is that your found are blocked for a small amount of time.
What would happen if there was collusion between nodes?
And while it is true that you are still limited by the Blockchain speed if the nodes don't cooperate, all the incentives are made so they do cooperate and that transactions happen near instantly.
But businesses have to follow the law. If a regulation were imposed, people would feel a need to comply. If they said to block transactions from Iran, on penalty of imprisonment, then they would do so. Etc. Avoiding all of that was the exact motivation for bitcoin. Adding all of the features and drawbacks of existing systems into bitcoin would undermine bitcoin's reason for existence.
Centralization at every layer of bitcoin has been the rule. Mining, exchanges, etc. Their dominance is so complete that if only a few of the primary exchanges were to blacklist an individual, they would have a very difficult time. In the same way that Mastercard and VISA banning PornHub is a major harm to that website.
Censorship-resistance is thus out the window, and there really isn't that many benefits left for bitcoin after that.
That's not true. That's the beauty of lightning, it manages to add a layer without needing to trust any of the intermediate party