This entire block debate, I have seen people on both sides accusing those on the other side of being a paid shill.

That needs to stop. Such an accusation without any evidence is extremely intellectually dishonest and is basically making the claim that no one is able to have a point of view or perspective that is different than yours of their own free conclusion. It is not a position that one can have an intelligent discussion with, because when you believe someone's motives are paid, you do not have any desire to listen to their perspective or try to see their point of view.

Me - I don't have anything specific against SegWit. I am not a fan of LN because to accept payments on LN, I must have a private key on a networked computer in order to sign the smart-contracts. That may work on an individual transaction basis but it doesn't scale well to lots of transactions every hour because it isn't secure.

I take the philosophy that every piece of software my server runs has at least one vulnerability that someone else knows how to exploit. It is thus my job to continually search for those exploits and patch them when I find them AND it is my job to minimize the damage that can be done when those holes are exploited before I have found them. The way you do that with bitcoin is by not having the private keys where there is any chance of them being stolen - that means not having them on a networked computer and that means automated signing of smart contracts needed for LN is not possible for any of my websites.

But I'm not opposed to the concept of SegWit nor am I opposed to people who do not mind taking that risk and want to use LN. Let them, I'm not their Pa - it's not my business, it's their business.

However, LN is not a solution to transaction problem for me. And right now it is not a solution to the transaction volume problem for anyone because LN does not even exist right now, it's still vaporware.

I wouldn't mind if Roger Ver sent me some free money, but neither he nor anyone else has done so, my position is my own and it is the position that I believe is in the best interest of my future use of Bitcoin and I understand that other people have different perspectives.

However it is not conductive to the debate for me to accuse any of you of taking money to have your position nor is it conductive to the debate for any of you to accuse me of taking money to have my position on the debate.

Those kind of accusations without a shred of evidence need to just plain stop.

This debate needs to be discussed, but it needs to be discussed in an intellectually honest way.