[rawtxapp]

It's L2, but you can have different types of L2s. With lightning network, you're opening and closing channels with a counterparty using on-chain transactions, so each channel can be tied back to an on-chain transaction.

Before someone points out that it would require tons of on-chain transactions to onboard everyone onto it, you can batch thousands of channel open/closes into a single transaction with new protocol upgrades.

[idiotsecant]

That's not even the most fundamental issue with LN though, it's not a fully thought out system. As LN node count increases the routing complexity increases exponentially, which is the classic problem of routing issues on large graphs that literally every networked system has. The internet solves this with some degree of human intervention to tip the scales to particular routes, which is something that the LN inherently can't (and shouldn't) do. There is some amount of optimization that could take place using common graph routing algorithms like OLSR or others but those represent foundational changes to the protocol which historically LN is allergic to for whatever reason and wouldn't entirely solve the problem in any case.

Simply put - it can't scale to that kind of throughput for a combination of cultural and technical reasons.

[keymone]

Sigh. Quick, go tell UPS and DHL and others that they must file for bankruptcy because traveling salesman problem or whatever is hard to solve.

This is just nonsense because, for instance, each LN hub can configure how much processing it wants to take on by focusing on most profitable subgraph.

In the end, LN will be processing more and more payments and you will keep ignoring that fact and claiming that it can’t scale. This has been happening for years already.

[suyjuris]

> the routing complexity increases exponentially, which is the classic problem of routing issues on large graphs that literally every networked system has

I assume you are using “exponentially” in its informal meaning of “somewhat quickly” ? At least I am not aware of any routing issues that scale exponentially with the size of the graph.

To the contrary, if you can pick the graph structure then routing is not very difficult at all.

[rawtxapp]

Most end-users won't be acting as payment gateways, they'll all have private channels, so they won't appear in the routing graphs. The number of routing nodes would be many magnitude smaller than total number of LN users. It's working fine for now with growing adoption (1ml.com) and I believe it'll only get better with time.

[null0pointer]

The main issue with LN is even more fundamental than that. Their argument against other scaling solutions was basically "if we scale on chain the hardware requirements will be hard for regular people to keep up and decentralization will suffer". So instead they went about and created a system where only the wealthy have the capital to commit to open enough channels and route payments. LN is almost totally antithetical to crypto in that it enables the creation of the very thing crypto sought to destroy; gatekeeping payment processors. Bitcoin was co-opted by Blockstream and co. who wanted to become Visa/Mastercard-like rent seeking middlemen.

Opinion part: Monero is technically superior to Bitcoin in basically every way.

[HashBasher]

Exactly, CashApp/RobinHood/Coinbase/Kraken are all bitcoin L2. Centralized and trusted, but L2 nonetheless.