Gavin, do you use a debit card or credit card? Then you do fit that use case. When you buy a coffee at Starbucks, it is your bank that pays Starbuck's bank. So it is with micropayment hubs.

On Sun, Jun 28, 2015 at 1:12 PM, Mark Friedenbach <mark@friedenbach.org> wrote:

But ultimately, lightning usefully solves a problem where participants have semi-long lived payment endpoints.

Very few of my own personal Bitcoin transactions fit that use-case.

In fact, very few of my own personal dollar transactions fit that use-case (I suppose if I was addicted to Starbucks I'd have one of their payment cards that I topped up every once in a while, which would map nicely onto a payment channel). I suppose I could setup a payment channel with the grocery store I shop at once a week, but that would be inconvenient (I'd have to pre-fund it) and bad for my privacy.

I can see how payment channels would work between big financial institutions as a settlement layer, but isn't that exactly the centralization concern that is making a lot of people worried about increasing the max block size?

And if there are only a dozen or two popular hubs, that's much worse centralization-wise compared to a few thousand fully-validating Bitcoin nodes.

Don't get me wrong, I think the Lightning Network is a fantastic idea and a great experiment and will likely be used for all sorts of great payment innovations (micropayments for bandwidth maybe, or maybe paying workers by the hour instead of at the end of the month). But I don't think it is a scaling solution for the types of payments the Bitcoin network is handling today.

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Gavin Andresen