There are a lot of sketches and ideas for its parts, but not a design for the whole that is expected to work.  

I have asked several times to Adam, Luke, adn other "new core devs" to provide a simple but 'complete' example of how a week of "life under LN" would be like for, say 3 consumers, 3 merchants, and one hub.  The discussion invariably ends at that point.  Because, when one tries to think how the pieces would fit and spin together, one sees that they wouldn't.

Not to mention that the LN woudl be the exct opposite of what bitcoin was supposed to be.


The problem with Sidechains is that the definition is (and must be) so vague that anything can be said to be a sidechain.  I have read the whitepaper carefully, and concluded that the old sofa in my living room is a sidechain.  (In fact, the proof of that is trivial.  The proof that it is a good sidechain requires a bit more argument. I hope to post the proofs eventually.)  

The point is that a sidechain is supposed to be designed, implemented, and managed independently of bitcoin; and therefore cannot be trusted to behave in any specific way, except that it cannot break bitcoin -- which no one is supposed to be able to do anyway.  

And, anyway, the core devs themselves admitted that sidechains will not solve the scalability problem.  


RBF and CPFP are not solutions to scalability, or ingredients of the "overlay network".  They are part of the "fee market" concept that the "new devs" claim will make a block size increase unnecessary, even undesirable.  

Yes, unfortunately there are already implementations of RBF; and Peter Todd convinced F2Pool to go ahead and implement his favorite brand of RBF, that makes it easy to do double-spends of 0-confirmation payments.  (Until others warned F2Pool of the risks, and they pulled back.)  

And Luke has just released his own fork of the core, that implements CPFP and also a relay node filter that discards transactions that he considers "spam" (mostly, SatoshiDice and the like).