It's such a joke that the actual payment routing is only discussed in a 13 line paragraph in the Lightning Network whitepaper (section 8.4) [1]. Routing is the

It's such a joke that the actual payment routing is only discussed in a 13 line paragraph in the Lightning Network whitepaper (section 8.4) [1]. Routing is the actual real-world problem that is in need to be solved before LN could be considered working. Instead, the whitepaper states: > It is theoretically possible to build a route map implicitly from observing 2-of-2 multisigs on the blockchain to build a routing table. [...] Node discovery can occur along the edges by pre-selecting and offering partial routes to well-known nodes. That's it. The word "routing" also only appears once outside of that section. There are several proposals that all eventually end in "use payment hubs with high liquidity", which are just the equivalent of banks. It doesn't solve any of the problems that the Bitcoin crowd wanted to solve in the first place: Fees will still exist as nobody will altruistically commit thousands of Bitcoin into thousands of LN channels, decentralization is out of the window, and anonymity (or rather pseudonymity) will be easily reversed due to the need for long lasting LN channels to make efficient use of the LN. All of the above is not even considering that you need to commit a large amount of Bitcoin into LN channels to be able to make use of LN's advantages (not waiting for block confirmations) effectively - which you have to constantly monitor to not lose your channel contents. LN is an interesting technological experiment but it has no practical uses outside of test environments due to the limitations I laid out above. 1: https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf