In a vacuum, you are correct. However, it is important to notice how a lot of the network traffic is, indeed, taken up by these small group of centralized companies. For instance, right now as the trading volume of Bitcoin increases, a lot of the transactions being sent and received through the network are related to some exchange disproportionately. Managing all of these transactions off-chain and then finalizing them on-chain would help free up space for the direct transactions you are talking about who would end up paying less fees because of less network congestion. The centralized companies do benefit directly from this change, as you say, but it also indirectly helps users using independent wallets, which I assume would include most of us here.
As for what happens if the congestion in the network is actually caused by a big margin by direct transactions, I do concede that I am not sure how the Lightning Network could help in that regard. That being said, I certainly do not know all of the specifics of the Lightning Network, but you do bring up a good point.
I completely agree. In the short term at least, the Lightning network is clearly needed as a solution to congestion by offloading transactions from large centralized companies with large numbers of transactions so that there would be less congestion, and therefore lower fees and faster confirmations for everyone else. I am totally on board with that use case.
However, my concerns are more for the long term. With what happens when miners need to be paid in transaction fees to remain in operation at all. In order for the network to be profitable for miners when the last coin has been mined (and, really, long before then) we'd have to have a shift towards being paid in transaction fees which means the network itself must both expand to handle more transactions and to also have an increased number of transactions overall. If we kept the block ceiling where it is, or even just a little above it, there won't really be enough transactions for the miners to benefit enough to remain in operation.
My point is basically that we shouldn't rely heavily on the lightning network as a silver bullet, and we should also plan for a single change to account for all the changes to block sizes that will be needed rather than dealing with these problems every few years on repetition.
As a side note: If only most discussion threads could be like this one where people can actually discuss without spammers repeating the same thing others have already said, that would be great.
I hope it can stay that way
