The main chain is not abandoned, it’s used as a settlement layer. If I hand you a paper bitcoin wallet worth a certain amount of satoshis, that’s still bitcoin

The main chain is not abandoned, it’s used as a settlement layer. If I hand you a paper bitcoin wallet worth a certain amount of satoshis, that’s still bitcoin. You rightly shouldn’t accept it because I know the private key and could rugpull those funds from your control. If there were cryptographic assurance to prevent that rugpull, owning that key becomes as valuable as the underlying asset. Your flawed explanation is like saying the dollars spent on a Visa card aren’t using US currency because the transaction isn’t immediately settled in the eyes of central banks. Edit: To be clear, there’s no credit involved in the LN transaction. I only used the analogy as a layman’s example. All LN transactions are fully collateralized and can be settled to the base layer at any time by either participant.