Problem is that even LN needs the onchain features to open and close channels. And despite the fact that I do not believe that this might be a problem in the near future, it's a fact that the more users the LN has, the more channels will need to be opened and closed. And when that needs to happen, and if the fees keep the way they are now, we will be waiting ages for channel open and closures and paying stupid high fees.
Certainly a correct answer.
I did want to add some additional information tough: it's pretty common practice to rebalance your channels, so if person A has a channel with person B (and A is using it to send funds to B all the time), B has a channel with C (and B is using it to send funds to C all the time) and C has a channel with A (and C is using it to send funds to A all the time), it's possible they can just rebalance their channels once in a while and closing and reopening a channel would only need to happen very rarely.
It is true, however, that at this point it'll cost you a lot of money to open a channel. It is also true that if you'll be using the LN only to send funds (and never receive) or if somebody opens a channel with you only to send you funds (which you'll never spend), you'll be forced to open/close channels on a regular basis.... But as long as you have a lot of channels already open, and you spend about the same amount as you receive, it *should', *in theory* more or less even out...
This congestion isn't fun for us, and eventough the LN will be a viable sollution, we *should have* opened channels when we were paying 1 sat/vbyte in fees... Opening channels right now will be costly, but the cost might be lower for opening a channel than for a couple dozen "regular" on chain transactions...
Man, i'm really bummed out that i had to shut down my lightning node due to rising dedicated server prices... I had so many open channels which i had to close just a couple of weeks ago...
Oh yeah, indeed. And seems that many transactions going on in the LN are in fact from rebalances. But yeah, good points you made there.
About the LN node, I'm sorry to hear that. I personally run my own LN node at my home. Of course that sometimes I have downtimes due to power going out for a couple of hours, but my node is small and mostly for routing. I don't run any services with it.