More of why Lightning network is going to be a scam:
Do you actually know what LN is? I'll tell you what it is. LN is nothing more than establishing bitcoin banks on top of the blockchain. All of the exact same regulation traditional banks have will be applied to them and bitcoin will be virtually identical to your current banking system. The only reason it hasn't happened yet is because it's too difficult for them to play whack-a-mole with regulating miners, but the LN "nodes" aka banks are less ambiguous in nature and will be regulated to infinity just like any normal financial services provider or bank.
The costs, compliance, and amount of lawyers needed will be so high only entities like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs will run them. This is how crony capitalism works. You introduce regulation with compliance requirements and fees so high that only your existing monopoly can participate while all small competitors are eliminated.
Nevermind the fact LN doesn't function in a decentralized manner in the first place. There is also ZERO incentive for LN nodes aka banks to broadcast transactions to external peers. There is actually incentive for these bitcoin banks to FORCE a hub and spoke model or cartel collective in order to hold their users hostage for usury fees (just like regular banks do). There's also nothing that stops them from changing usage of bitcoin as settlement to ripple, US dollars, or anything else.
A pow adjucator with pos bonded validator consensus system can serve the basis for such things like LN.
You just typed what I said in July 2016. The way I was talking about doing it requires you to convert bitcoin into two different coins. The coin you mine would not actually be a currency, it would just determine who the block validators are. You then use proof of burn to burn those non-currency mined coins to become a block validator. The block validators would be a fixed number like DPOS, and bitcoin would rest on top of that system essentially the equivalent of a user created asset in Bitshares. It only works when BTC distribution is over or if you cut off mining distribution prematurely.
There are a lot of different problems to work out with such a system and I didn't explain it all too well, but there it is. As you can see, my idea to use proof of burn is REQUIRED to enforce any type of decentralization in bitcoin because it prohibits big miners from having permanent monopoly:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1550027.0You probably dont want to burn but instead incentivize bonding instead. You also dont want a set number but open it up to anyone who can post required bond. The pow layer has fraud proofs to ban validators if needed. You dont need 2 currencies just 1 with a sidechain.
https://medium.com/@BlockchainFoundry/core-research-and-development-update-503e450b380cNot everything will be the same but something like that ^^..its on my roadmap for ultimately what Syscoin becomes. Theres non pow yet deterministic and bft consensus mechanisms you can throw in the L2 for the block creation on that side. Pow chain is still needed and wanted. Merge mined with btc.