nisiprius wrote: ↑Fri Feb 16, 2018 9:32 am
Bitcoin was designed and up to maybe 2015 universally presented as a practical payment system, not a base technology on which others could build a practical payment system someday. It was supposed to directly compete with credit cards and PayPal online.
Actually if you dig down to the founder's comments and discussions, he always saw it as a great experiment and put in things like timeLocks, etc which might allow payment channel mechanisms to scale in the future because he knew the Blockchain model by itself could never scale if the network became widely used.
nisiprius wrote: ↑Fri Feb 16, 2018 9:32 am
All the proposed fixes are too new to judge, and Lightning Network is as centralized and trust-based as PayPal.
Lightning Network is trustless just like the Bitcoin network itself. The nodes you connect to, process your transactions, they route value from one node to another, until it reaches the final destination. Just like in the Bitcoin network now, they have no control over your money. Just like the Bitcoin network, they cannot steal money you are sending to a destination address.
What is interesting is, the nodes that process your transaction don't even know where the money is going. Lightening uses source routing where originator defines the optimal path of hops to take and encrypts each hop in the path and embeds in layers. 1st node can only read outer layer, each node can only read where the next destination is and only the final node that knows the final destination. Conversely, the final node won't be able to map back and who the originator was. Each layer is encrypted with the node's public key and only that node would be able to get the information that is intended for them.
So you're not trusting some centralized authority with your money where they might be able to steal it, hold it, freeze it, censor it and track who is doing what.
If by centralized you mean there are going to be a few nodes that will be the center of transactions, that also remains to be seen. Unlike mining that require huge investments in hardware and availability of cheap energy, to run a well connected Lightening Network node, you need liquidity which is easier to accumulate than the huge mining investments. Also, a centralized hub that is a massive liquidity provider is also going to be taking a lot more risk.
So for these reasons, it's more likely that there is decentralized mesh network of nodes than a centralized hub and spoke model. But I don't think anybody really knows how the network will look a few years from now.