Yeah, they were a wee bit ridiculous. Isn't Lightning supposed to help with this, or is that another use case?
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Yeah, they were a wee bit ridiculous. Isn't Lightning supposed to help with this, or is that another use case?
No, Lightning was in fact supposed to help with this, and is supposed to help with this – but the question is whether Lightning will roll out to enough nodes and be trusted enough to make a difference.
Unfortunately in terms of design, Lightning just doesn't live up to a properly decentralized system. In terms of what is rewarded for node participants, and federating into large, hub systems is the most reasonable and rational response to the system Lightning proposes. After all, if you want to minimize the number of hops between a given payer and a given payee, the best means is a handful of very highly connected, high transaction rate core nodes and all the participants talking to one of those.
Whether bitcoin users will be interested enough in giving up the benefits of decentralization and exchange remains to be seen. If bitcoin continues to contract, fees will continue to drop, and actually doing business on the bitcoin block chain without less distributed intermediaries will be much more desirable.
I would be a liar if I said that I knew what the breakpoint is for desirability to make those things worthwhile. I don't know and I don't think anyone else really knows, either.