And don't give me the L2 lightning network bullshit. Both you and I know that it doesn't work as an actually decentralized payments system, and it plausible deniability and makeup for a centralized workaround of BTC's fundamental flaws
seems like you've made up your mind so doesn't make sense to engage, but if anybody else comes across this comment - it's pretty much tribalistic bs. lightning network works, it's a system that preserves Bitcoin's security guarantees while decoupling value transfers from onchain settlements. this is how you scale global distributed systems - you localize them into lots of smaller systems that can change state independently in a consistent manner.
The reason this doesnt scale is because for 100 million people to open one payment channel, it will take over a year to process all of those transactions. That wouldn't happen though as the transaction costs would skyrocket to the point people wouldn't bother.
Am I wrong? Genuinely, this is how I see it and why it cannot work.
you absolutely do not. you open a channel once with some node and that channel can be used to send payments to all other nodes.
it's also simplistic view that you need 2 transactions per settlement of a channel because with channel factories you can batch-open-and-close-and-top-off many different channels with single (albeit fairly large) transaction.
systems like that grow organically and people get onboarded via many different methods, so it's not like tomorrow we will have a queue of 100 million people waiting for channels to be opened.
i do expect bitcoin network to hit capacity limit by transactions in future and we will see what it is going to look like, but i rather prefer bitcoin's glacial pace of becoming more and more efficient at ground layer, forcing all sorts of experimentation to happen in upper layers and in sidechains without ever compromising the foundation.
Personally I don't like the glacial pace of ground layer dev, as it makes me think this stuff can't be solved. Each way you approach it is a compromise.
It is infinitely more important to preserve stability of foundation than it is to experiment with new features. Bitcoin runs in its current form for more than a decade and that stability is worth a lot.
What discourages that?
To which the only solution is basically opening a new channel - eg. A new L1 transaction
You either have to centralize the system, or you run into an unsolvable Canadian traveler problem making the thing fairly useless.
Nah, you’re just wrong because good enough solutions are easy to find, nobody cares about 100% optimal.
Try finding the shortest path to a network where you only discover the edges once you reach a node. You only get hilariously suboptimal solutions
Which is why in practice such a system has to be centralized (eg. El Salvador) or it's effectively useless (you resort to opening a new channel rather than passing the money along an unknowable list of channels)
again: LN doesn't need to optimally solve np-hard or worse problems to work, good-enough approximations are easy to find.
But it can't and never will work at large network sizes without being centralized. And no amount of development work will fix that, because it's a core design flaw.
Which is why the meme with LN was "its 18 months away from wherever you are in time".
It's always in early stages, because it can only achieve early stage levels of usability without devolving into a centralized system. By design.
yeah, if memes are the way you keep yourself informed on the topic then i totally understand your point of view.
the reality is that LN works and what you call "small cliques" are just subnets that route payments internally efficiently but are also able to route externally when the need arises.
this is literally how distributed systems are scaled, internet being the largest one.
it would be centralized if nobody could use LN if some one or two largest nodes failed, but the protocol is open and everybody can open a channel with everybody else and nodes in the middle have no way to censor traffic because they don't know neither the sender nor the receiver.
you're simply misinformed.
Again, either you centralize or you keep having it be a toy
so unless you point out the centers without which LN collapses, your claims are just bogus.