Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Is the Lightning Network centralized?
by
franky1
on 17/06/2018, 23:54:36 UTC
If you assume (as I do) that most economic activity in Bitcoin today is from individuals to large Bitcoin businesses (mostly exchanges), then you should further assume that most channels will be between users and those very same large businesses.

The hope would be that, as adoption increases, real-world use cases would become more prevalent on Lightning.  Retailers providing tangible goods and services would ideally start to see as much traffic as exchanges.  But obviously we'll have to wait and see how that pans out.

I'd say it's not that uncommon for most of our daily financial transactions to be with businesses rather than other individuals, so it's only natural that most of the money will flow in a similar fashion in Bitcoin as it becomes more mainstream.

imaginiing channels
users who may budget they only want to spend $50 a week ($200 a month) will NOT want to put their $200 into 4 channels incase one of the route to a peer goes offline. because that $50 gets locked or cost them on unchain fee to get it out again.

users will end u choosing a hub (bank branch) to connect to and just throw the whole $200 in knowing its just 1 onchain fee they will need to worry about if they need to exit. and decide a hub is less likely to go off line than random users.

again users will not want to set up multiple channels. so the hop model of multiple routes wont work.
(its worth people running scenarios, it helps)
 and the HUB (bank branch) model begins to shine.

take youe own bank account. would you prefer your wages going into one account and then using that account to pay all your bills. or have 8 bank accounts and when you get paid you then have to pay a wire transfer(onchain fe) to then redistribute ur salary into 8 accounts dedicated to each paying a bill.and then knowing if something goes wrong with bing unable to pay a bill it then costs you another onchain fee to move funds again.. most people end up for convenience just throwing it all into one well connected reourse and letting them sign have joint control of your funds
.. this is how banks formed in the first place
even now looking at the LN network overview you can already se many users with 1-2 channels. not 4-8 channels.. and those 1-2 channls are betwen hubs in most cases.. and the hubs that have way way more than 8 connections. are what will bcome the new bank branches.