You are contradicting yourself: First you say that it's centralized, then you say that you have to open a channel to every target that you want to transact with

You are contradicting yourself: First you say that it's centralized, then you say that you have to open a channel to every target that you want to transact with. Both are wrong: 1. Lightning has several thousand routable nodes which you can connect to, which means it's not centralized 2. Those nodes have channels between each other, so to reach some target there just needs to be a path between some nodes to that target. E.g. you have a channel from your wallet A to node B, B to C, and C to target. You can do a payment to the target without a direct channel.