Quote from: haltingprobability on October 30, 2017, 04:38:45 AM

Quote from: aliashraf on October 30, 2017, 04:23:30 AM

The way I have understood Lightning, it is focused on micropayments in its wierd approach: channels that work like buffers and are 'flushed' periodically

You've simplified to the point of over-simplification. The "buffer" (payment channel) has an expiration that is pre-set. The payment channel can be utilized to make many small payments until it expires. It's not really a periodic buffer like a hardware buffer or a software queue, because the channel simply closes for good once it expires.

not bad for a fresh start in a forum, but on the contrary you are complicating a trivial concept to the point of over-complication IMO.
You are just suggesting it (a payment channel in LN terminology) is not a 'buffer' because it has an expiration date, right? But I think buffers can have a auto-flush feature triggered by a clock (block height in a chain, for instance) and they are still nothing more than a buffer.
I understand coupling a decentralized ledger with such a data structure is a very hard work and needs a lot of tricks and protocol developments but in the end we just have a simple data structure in hand with a very limited set of practical use cases, I'll come to this in my next paragraphs.

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while being managed by specialized nodes , ... (believe it? how some people are so excited about this proposal?)

This is a skewed perception. Payment channels do not need anybody to "manage" them at all. LN adds a way to "chain" payment channels together but nobody in a LN is "managing" anything. One way you can utilize LN is to build a hub-and-spoke (or "star topology") payment model that allows many individual users (spokes) to have an open payment channel with one hub so that they can all make payments to one another without having to open a zillion payment channels on the blockchain. "So, we're back to centralized payment systems." Not quite. Since any individual can open a payment channel with any other individual, the central-hubs of hub-and-spoke style LN networks cannot "monopolize and then jack up fees". They will have no choice but to charge going rates, otherwise, users will just walk away and do it manually.

Oh you totally misunderstood my criticism, I have not issued any centralization accusation, not at all! I'm talking about specialized nodes (hubs) which are needed for an ad-hock payment to take place between an arbitrary couple of wallets. And this hub is managing the channel for sure, even if we don't name it this way.

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I don't think it can help cryptocurrency at all,

On the contrary, cryptocurrency will never receive widespread adoption without it.

And here is your biggest mistake and the very important point you have overlooked: cryptocurrency adoption is nothing to do with buffers (auto-flushed or whatever) because the main use case is not recurring payments in the real world, and it is just what LN is solely about.

I prefer to discuss LN in another topic, obviously LN is not about inter-chain atomic swaps and we can remain focused on the main subject, which is whether atomic swap can improve state of the art in decentralized exchange development or it can not.