Quote from: PlanetCrypto on May 31, 2018, 09:34:14 AM

Lightning network is not the best solution so far, many projects have been started to break through the existing technology, TPS has reached a high level, but does not exclude the lightning networks continue to develop a technology will be neck and neck, blockchain technology changes with each passing day, I support developers behavior of this effort, hope to be able to succeed.

Lightning Network is only the first, and currently the most prominent, of the layers built on top of the public blockchain. It's mostly Bitcoin's blockchain when we talk about LN, but there is also a variant for Litecoin, Ethereum, there called "Raiden", and a few others.

Lightning Network will bring us the option to stream money, send funds back and forth billions of times, and do the final settlement much later.

Just like it would make no sense that two banks exchange their funds each time any of their customers buy or sell a chewing gum, the same applies to the blockchain technology. Much better is to let people buy/sell things many, many times and only then do the settlement when the amount of funds to be exchanged between the parties has reached some predefined level (which you can setup freely when opening a channel).

However, there is still enough to do, like routing for example. There will be many competing solutions for that. And just like TCP/IP never defined routing but simply took care of the most basic things that constitute the backbone of the internet (packet switching, addressing, connectivity), the Lightning Network will do the same for this new kind of internet, which is often called the Internet of Money.

The best way to achieve all those goals is to keep each layer as specialized and as constrained as possible. Don't try to solve too much on a single layer.