Sorry, I think I overreacted here.  From your further posts, it seems your questions have been sincere.  I should explain.

There is a steady stream of posts, often from new accounts, which desperately try to find something, anything wrong with Lightning.  I sometimes see excellent posters waste hours and an ocean of virtual ink trying to keep up with frivolous arguments.  And while there’s nothing wrong with a new account, insofar as all start that way, that gives no post history for me to check and see if you be that type.

Thus you may understand my reflexive irritation at apparent fear, uncertainty, and doubt expressed over the urgent need for softforks which were already done.  The task of pulling up the page numbers so that other readers could find context for a mish-mash of disparate quotes did not help matters.

There is a very competitive market, with a hefty dose of politics involved.  There are many people with an axe to grind against Bitcoin.  Lightning Network is a brilliant new system with a promising future—Bitcoin’s future.  I think you can see where many of us who simply want to enjoy this new technology may oft be a bit on the defensive.


I myself tend to expect that the connectedness of nodes will roughly follow something like a Gaussian (bell-shaped) distribution.  Those connected to only one node would be at one extreme; nodes connected to a very large number of others would be at the other; and most would lie somewhere in the middle.  But that, as all else said on this topic, is a matter of more or less well-informed speculation.  I think we will really need to wait and see how the network grows.


It’s not a matter of layers.  From what I understand, there are existing userfriendly implementations which seem not so different than userfriendly GUI Bitcoin wallets; though I am not familiar with them as I should be.  Anyway, I’ve seen screenshots which looked simple and slick.  Time for me to catch up with what’s happening there!