Let me further clarify: Lightning is not worthless and has already become the basis of a new industry of apps and services.
Like any low-value transaction using bitcoin, like the proverbial cup of coffee, it’s not necessary to wait for even one confirmation before doing anything.
Plain vanilla lightning uses a UTXO (that’s what a bitcoin on the blockchain is, an unspent transaction) to open a channel. But you don’t have to wait 10 minutes for at least 1 confirmation before using the payment channel.
I’ve received multiple LN transactions with various LN apps and it’s always been instant.
Once the payment channel is opened, it stays open as long as it needs to. But the killer feature is being able to transact without requiring the underlying bitcoin blockchain; it’s only required once the parties decide to close the channel.
Same thing with multi hop payments.
There are many enhancements being worked on, like loop-in, loop-out and submarine swaps, which handle providing liquidity to enable transactions and the ability to make swaps between chains, like being able to “swap” between bitcoin and light coin if that was desired.
There’s also work happening to enable one on-chain UTXO to fund multiple payment channels in one go.
So tens of thousands of transactions can take place without touching the underlying blockchain.
So there’s no lag when it comes to opening or closing a payment channel.
There are no scalability issues; we’ll have more LN nodes than Bitcoin full nodes (about 55,000 worldwide) by this time next year and it’ll be fine.
> But the killer feature is being able to transact without requiring the underlying bitcoin blockchain.
To be clear, you can send and receive bitcoin without the fees or latency of the bitcoin blockchain until you close the channel. And depending on the use case, that could be weeks or months in the future.
And even when opening or closing a payment channel, you don’t have to wait for the blockchain to confirm that transaction.
> Except a 4tx/sec cap on opening and closing channels.
Once a channel is funded, it can stay open for as long as it needs to. I can have a payment channel open with my local coffeeshop and we can transact dozens of times; only the final bill has to be broadcast to the bitcoin blockchain.
Well connected LN nodes can be connected to hundreds of other nodes and route transactions accordingly.
In the short time LN has been available, there are over 10,000 nodes and growing; the network capacity is almost $8 million USD: https://1ml.com/statistics
