[johanvts]

Thanks, I accept that it requires less trust than using a central ledger, still it cannot provide the level of trustlessness bitcon can, if it could why use btc? I totally agree with your analogy, but in my view that just underlines that BTC is not useable as a currency, just as gold is not.

[littlecranky67]

> if it could why use btc?

You still don't grasp lightning fully, and I totally understand because it a complex concept. It is not its own crypto, it is not a token, and lightning does not even use a blockchain. It is a layer 2 network, meaning it builds upon BTC and requires BTC node to run (to monitor the new blocks and publish transactions). So lightning cannot replace bitcoin, it augments it.

[johanvts]

Thank you. It's a good point, but what I am trying to say is that lightning cannot provide the level of security BTC does, hence the need to constantly return to the safety of the block-chain. There is no free lunch: Security in the lightning network must break down/i.e. require more trust as the number of node-jumps in a transaction increases, and perhaps as the number of transactions in the channel increases as well. If not, then lightning solves the distributed double spend problem in its own (efficient) way, that we should just use instead of BTC.

Would you agree with me that lightning 'stretches' each BTC transaction by using clever tricks ala. aggregation, checksums, hashing, etc.? I buy that this scales the number of transactions dramatically, especially between a limited number of parties. It might be that this is stretches far enough be make BTC useful as a currency, but I remain very doubtful of that. If that is indeed the case, it seems that BTC has managed to fail as a currency for other reasons.