Once a problem looks to be a challenge on first layer, one should firstly think of improving the infrastructure. Bitcoin is not a rigid, dead system. This infrastructure has more potentials to be unleashed and yet we have sharding solutions in the horizon as well. Sharding is a first layer protocol, an on-chain scalability solution.
Sharding is more elegant and beautiful compared to ugly complicated second layer solutions like LN, which completely abstracts users from the consensus algorithm, the way google, facebook, .... ruined the Internet and turned it to such a dangerous place for ordinary people by compromising their privacy and security. I suppose you guys have a same agenda for destroying bitcoin by putting people behind layers of abstraction.
It is an insane strategy. Bitcoin needs fresh breath to breath interaction with users and simplicity. Only a corporate employee would take second layer development serious, a hacker, just don't GAS.

Do we have an example of sharding that actually works and scales at least nearly as well as LN? Has it been tested not just theorized? If that project exists than I am interested in it.
We don't need sharding yet, the scalability and micro payment problems are not actually around yet, they are not urgent. To get sharding to work, we need 'getting rid of pools' by improving the protocol, sharding doesn't work fine with pools. First things first!
Good dreams, non of them feasible yet, who is in charge of routing this messages?
Anyway, what the hell is it? A 4
th layer IP on bitcoin on tcp/ip on ip protocol?

A socialist? Here on bitcoin talk? I never thought I would see that. ...
WTF? are you kidding? We are all socialists here, we have always been and we will be socialists!
Btctalk is funded by Satoshi Nakamoto, remember?
It is about Bitcoin! Sounds familiar? Yes! Yes! The internet money that is supposed to retire banks of any kind all over the globe and it is decentralized and trustless and public and open!
Wait! Have you ever heard of Bitcoin's axiom of resistance ?
Nop?!
No kidding, 1000+ posts and you don't have a clue about where you are ... fucking amazing.
... No, but seriously, without a central planer how will farmers know which processing plants to route their soybeans to? How will grocery stores know which customers to route which products to? Having an entity "in charge" of routing is precisely the problem that I was hoping a truly scalable cryptocurrency could solve.
Ok then. Centers are seriously needed, because you can't imagine how a p2p system work, ok, I understand, you should join to an internship or something, I understand, you need help.
I could make some guesses about how it might be done but that is beyond the scope of this thread so we probably shouldn't go too far down this particular rabbit hole here. I'll say, it could work something like the address it's self encodes some data about its rough location on planet earth, then nodes early in the chain could just begin by roughing it "thattaway" and later nodes in the chain would have more detailed maps of their local network topography. That's just one possible idea out of nearly infinity. The inability to think of something here is not proof that it wouldn't work, its proof of a failure of imagination.
Noway! Addresses aren't zip codes, thanks god!
What matters for this discussion is not the solution, but whether or not it is soluble. What matters is, when cash is up for grabs, will individual entrepreneurs be able to figure out how to forward data in such a way as to get it generally closer to it's destination than it was before? That's actually not a tall order. Most of the time you will need to get to your nearest city first, then the nearest regional hub, then from there to the regional hub nearest your destination and same process out to your destination. It really isn't rocket science.
No, it is not soluble without ruining decentralization agenda of cryptocurrency. We have banks, traditional banking, which is an ultimate centralized solution, you can't optimize it a bit in a centralized framework.