>Maybe I am too dumb to understand LN, but what gives BTC an edge over, say Litecoin, if both BTC and Litcoin have LN fully implemented. You have to understand

>Maybe I am too dumb to understand LN, but what gives BTC an edge over, say Litecoin, if both BTC and Litcoin have LN fully implemented. You have to understand the end goal of the LN. A future with LN is one with off-chain instant transactions with unlimited throughput. This is enabled by a network of LN hubs where each "edge" is a payment channel. Then sending a payment on the LN is a matter of routing your payment through existing hubs. As long as you already have some locked amount on the LN and there is a route between you and your intended destination, the transaction can happen instantly and immutably off chain. Once you close your connection then the transactions are settled on chain. Essentially an unlimited number LN transactions can occur in between an on-chain settlement. But this requires widespread deployment of LN hubs which only happens if there is enough incentive by sellers to join. If enough of their customers have bitcoin they want to spend, they will join. If some alt-coin has all the tech ready for the LN, but lack the widespread distribution of their tokens to incentivize sellers to join, it won't happen. This is why the idea of bitcoin being a store of value is a necessary step in the mainstreaming of bitcoin for payments: it gives people an incentive to buy and hold it now. A "currency" that only greases the wheels of transactions (i.e. bought for the duration of a tx then immediately sold) is no currency. It has to be worth holding in its own right and "store of value" bitcoin provides that. >I never see anyone ever claim LN will allow +10x transactions. Most claims I read are 1.7x-4x . If you have a source on that I'd really appreciate it (I will read it.) I'm guessing what they mean is that Segwit reduces the signature and thus increases the on chain capacity by 1.7x. People say this in an attempt to cloud the issue of Segwit vs bigger blocks. The LN isn't about stuffing more transactions into each block. >Great, but people are hungry now and they will just go to other restaurants (and maybe the other restaurants are almost as good as this one and so the patrons will stop coming to yours.) But most people aren't hungry now. For most people, paypal and VISA works just fine. They will only switch when the advantages over these legacy systems are great enough. This only happens with the fully deployed LN. For the small number of people that want anonymous transactions now, or need to circumvent the banking infrastructure now, they will use bitcoin or any number of alt-coins. But the value this service provides as it stands just doesn't warrant multi-billion dollar market caps: there simply isn't enough simultaneous transactions (i.e. instantaneous demand) to drive up the cost of the service. >I never see anyone ever claim LN will allow +10x transactions. Most claims I read are 1.7x-4x . If you have a source on that I'd really appreciate it (I will read it.) I don't have any good authoritative sources on hand, but a recent comment I saw on reddit really drives home the value of the LN (warning, its a bit ranty): https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7fde71/im_switching_to_bch_heres_why_from_an_unbiased/dqboobz/ https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7fde71/im_switching_to...