the funny thing about bitcoin cash and its followers is that they talk shit about bitcoin while doing whatever bitcoin does, either now or in the near future. and i mean it literary everything including SegWit, LN and everything else. the only thing they changed was block size. they may not have all of these now but they will add them with a different name eventually. for example Bech32 addresses are already implemented for BCH, there are talks about second layer with a different name than LN!
Well, they have a point, at least: If they implement LN or a similar off-chain network, with a bigger block size, they can claim at least three advantages:
- that it would be easier to open a LN channel, as transaction fees will be smaller;
- that they leave people the choice to always do a (relatively cheap) on-chain transaction even if the network is more congested (e.g. with more than 10 tps) instead of massive pressure to use LN for everything in this situation;
- that if an hub tries to scam their clients broadcasting massively old channel states, there will be enough block space for all victims of this kind of scam to settle their channels fastly.
I still think that BCH fans underestimate the centralization risks of their approach. A more conservative flexible-blocksize currency would have my support (like I wrote several times), but BCH is going way too fast.
but there are a couple of problems with that.
- BCH was created solely because their views (at least what they pretended) was that bitcoin should only be used on-chain and there should be nothing else. adding LN or something like LN with a different name would be proving their true reasons for creating BCH: taking over bitcoin
- people sometimes forget that BCH is a fork of bitcoin so it shares all the problems of bitcoin too. just because they increased the block size it doesn't mean they solved the "spam attack" problem. the reason why it is not happening right now is because blocks are completely empty, there is no incentive to attack something like that. if it starts being used more and blocks were fuller then a spam attack would occur and the congestion that you mentioned would occur over there just as easily.
- and finally there is nothing stopping bitcoin from increasing the block size with a hard fork. and i do believe that it will happen eventually in which case there would be even less reason for BCH to even exist.