Quote from: cellard on August 30, 2018, 02:12:54 PM

Quote from: bob123 on August 30, 2018, 08:39:09 AM

Quote from: Kakmakr on August 30, 2018, 06:52:18 AM

We need massive amounts of settlement tx's on-chain, when people open & close channels on the Lightning Network and the price of a bitcoin must grow exponentially for miners to be profitable. Undecided

With a big user base who is transacting daily on the LN, there will be enough on-chain transactions.
And if not, the fees for the on-chain transactions will be low enough for users to be attracted by on-chain tx's again.
I believe this will find an equilibrium.

The price does only have to grow exponentially if the miner do want to keep increasing the hashrate.
If mining gets unprofitable, the miner with the highest costs and lowest capital will stop mining and vice versa. This should also find an equilibrium.

I don't know why but people often forget that on-chain transactions will continue happening every 10 minutes, without LN.

These that can afford on-chain transactions and see a point in doing them (most likely for bigger transactions that require it to be on-chain) will always find a good opportunity cost to use it and thus keep paying miners.

As usage goes up fees goes up, miners happy, hashrate goes up, users happy due safer blockchain. It's a nice snowball effect.

We all would like to be able to transact instant, cheaply on-chain without no sequences but apparently physics don't work that way, for now either pay the fee or use LN.

Also, miners might start to supplement their income by hosting LN Nodes and getting fees from forwarding people's tx's. If they stop mining, then the Lightning Network will stop functioning and they will not get any fees from both the LN and the miners fees from their Bitcoin mining.

So in my opinion the Lightning Network actually supplement their income or it might just balance it out, when the Block reward decline. Huh