People must lock BTC in the "channels" from them to each of the peers they ever want to transact with, in the amount of what they will spend with them in the future. This should produce approximately 10billion*10billion channels in total (so 1^20 whateverellion channels for all humans). Then magic internet machine will solve this Traveler Salesman problem for each transaction.
After people realised that this is a crap idea, they have reinvented banks, who take people's BTC and give them IOUs instead. Then only banks have to deal with the "channels" and "locked" tokens in a centralised way, lessening the overall complexity.
Few understand :)