Thanks for the info! 1. I see current fees are around $1.90/txn these days. My bad, it’s been quite some time since I’ve made a Bitcoin transaction. If on-chai

Thanks for the info! 1. I see current fees are around $1.90/txn these days. My bad, it’s been quite some time since I’ve made a Bitcoin transaction. If on-chain transactions are cheap, what motivation does a user have to use lightning? 2. I actually didn’t know it was onion routed, that’s good! There is still the possibility of censorship at the edges though, which could propagate throughout the network via “I won’t open a channel with anyone who opens a channel with X”. Although this issue exists in most federated systems like Mastodon and Matrix. I don’t know a way to solve it other than full anonymity. I’m assuming it’s public knowledge who has an open channel with who. 3. My understanding is that opening a channel locks the funds into that channel. As you said you can still use those funds for lightning transactions, assuming that the other party is well connected and you can route to your destination via them. 4. I do agree that it can be useful for most things while at the same time failing its design goals. The thing I’m extremely wary of is creating a system which handles 99% of use cases perfectly but accidentally degrades the service for the rest. If lightning gets enough adoption that it handles 99% of Bitcoin traffic then I’d expect 2 things to happen. First, a small set of hub lightning nodes would emerge which everyone would route through. These nodes would be subject to KYC/AML laws by governments and would be required to begin censoring transactions in the manner described in #2 by refusing to open a channel with anyone who either is a node that does not comply with KYC/AML, or an individual who has not jumped through enough hoops. Second, anyone who makes an on-chain transaction that is not lightning related is instantly suspicious, like handing someone a brown paper bag full of cash. I think this would be an unfortunate state for Bitcoin to end up in as it would have become the very thing it sought to destroy. On atomic swaps. I think they’re really great. The only issue is I can’t imagine myself ever converting Monero to Bitcoin for fear of ending up with coins tainted in some way that I’m not sophisticated enough to discover until it’s too late. I don’t have a solution for this. Finally I want to say that I appreciate your response, as there is more nuance to the lightning network than I initially presented. Admittedly I was a little overzealous with my comment above, but I’m glad we can have a honest discussion about things. Rare on the internet these days!