Quote from: cbeast on February 11, 2016, 11:19:07 AM

That's an awfully ambitious timetable for something that isn't even beta testing yet. Something this new will require years of testing to be done in a safe manner. Meanwhile the villagers gather to push forward the populist solution of larger and larger blocks.

Have you been following LN Development ? Rusty, Joseph Poon, and Thaddeus Dryja have been making some real progress.
Most Code is already ready and being tested as we speak:

https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning
https://github.com/hashplex/Lightning
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/

To be clear, 3rd quarter 2016 is when LN will begin to roll out on the live network.

Quote from: sAt0sHiFanClub on February 11, 2016, 11:16:56 AM

I'm worried that it seems the impetus is to cut it off before it can be established by the means with which it was originally intended to be reached - by running the software of your choice.

This has always been the case and continues to be the case . Core supports multiple implementations ... that is why they spend so much time fixing(lack of extensive modularity) Satoshi's code with libbitcoinconsensus.

More insight into Satoshi's code for the layman-
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3di6zc/nick_szabos_hidden_work/ct5j4wu