Lightning is much more than a transaction layer. It provides privacy and should enable cross-chain swaps in the future. Although it is developed and applied for Bitcoin, it is open to other Chains. I think the only reason it's not applicable to Hive right now is because of the one-hour transaction expiration for multisig transactions (though I'm not a programmer, so maybe there's more).
It would be fantastic to have it on Hive because then you could spend HBD almost anonymously, which is important for many retail transactions because you don't want everyone to know your account balance or social media history just because you buy a piece of gum. And future cross-chain swaps could be a way to avoid centralized exchanges. To a small extent it would also relieve the chain.
Of course, this is much smaller than your plan to take over the Eurodollar market ;-)
@brianoflondon already built a bridge with the v4v project so we are there. He has a node running and I believe is opening it up to other node operators.
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His work is great! But a shared second layer with Bitcoin, including trustless swaps, would get us to $100 much sooner. The money is in Bitcoin not in Hive. In addition, you can have trustless swaps to Litecoin, for example, as the second layer can be shared across blockchains in the future, and almost anonymously (perfect with a stablecoin like HBD).
Of course, this is just wishful thinking, because Lightning is not fully implemented yet and I don't know if we would have programmers who can implement it.