According to my calendar, 2017 has already passed.
Gee thanks, hadn't noticed.
The paper is specifically talking about raising the block size limit with a hard fork. They are going with the argument that miners might be opposed to such a hard fork and users not. So the solution to that is for miners to implement a soft limit after such a hard fork goes through.
Ah ok I see, thanks.
No, nothing stops people from doing that. But likewise, nothing is stopping people from bypassing that "master-node" and directly connecting to the person they wish to transact with.
Except for the cost of opening a new channel (which shouldn't be more than a couple dollars I think). Right? Just saying it seems like even a small fee would deter people from opening many p2p connections when you can just have one open that serves all your needs with minimal fees. Obviously LN is going to need one more layer on top as an end-user GUI/app that makes this simple so grandma can use it, just trying to visualize that.
Do you know if there's a more recent version of the Lightning Network white paper? The latest I've found is version 0.5.9.2 dated January 14, 2016.
Thanks for asking that, was going to myself as well. Here is the link that works to the latest protocol from achow101:
https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lightning-rfc/-----
Edit: quote attribution