Quote from: LoyceV on Today at 09:16:08 AM

I'm basically just speculating here. But I do know many people believe in LN. Why else would there already be so many different wallets out there, some with very active development?

Just because someone is developing a product doesn't mean that the product will be successful. All developers believe in their product, and all hope that they will be a great success. But only a few out of hundreds achieve success.

It took me a couple of days to understand how cool Bitcoin is. But I spent about six months intermittently on LN, but I still didn't understand what the optimism of LN developers is based on. There are too many unavoidable design flaws. My experience and my intuition tell me that LN has ~1% chance of great success.

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Either fools or fans will risk their money for a profit of less than 1% per year.

If fools and fans make LN grow, I'm okay with that

Do you draw an optimistic conclusion from each fact?

The ranks of big-money fools and big-money fans aren't that numerous.

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If people use custodial services, they don't need LN.

That's not true. Any exchange, casino or random website can create their own custodial "tipping service". The great thing from making a LN custodial service is that it also works externally. BlueWallet for instance is custodial, if I make a payment to another BlueWallet user, nothing happens on the Lightning Network. But I can use the same wallet to make an external payment too. Without that, there wouldn't be any use for this wallet.
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The user doesn't need LN. The custodial service needs LN.

If your external recipient also uses a custodial service, then they don't need LN either. And two custodial services can agree among themselves and without any LN. Why would they invest heavily in a particular channel? The way banks work with each other now.