Since when does the Lightning Network does not require third-party custodial wallets? Can you quote your source for that claim?
I don't think that's true at all. Others more familiar with Lightning Network can do a better job refuting it. What I read is that either party can finish the transaction by themselves - they can close the channel at any time. If one party is trying to steal from the other, they can be caught up to a week later, and lose all the Bitcoin they put into the transaction. None of which involves third-party trust or wallets, so you should give a source for that.
I don't know who you're quoting with "in theory", but I would agree Bitcoin and Lightning Network are speculative. That's why there's controversy, because some people believe there will be more value than the current BTC price, and others argue less - or even worthless.
If a start-up creates a payment system, they face a similar problem. How many brick and mortar stores accept PayPal? Not as many as accept it online. A payment system starts as an untested experiment that people fear will risk their money. Early adopters need to prove it works before there's any hope of adoption by later waves of customers and vendors. We're not there yet for Lightning Network - it's speculative, and early on. So yes, we don't know how it will turn out, which is why there's such strong disagreement in this thread about crypto.
According to the AP Stylebook, a correct use of quotation marks is to set off or delineate a word or phrase. For example:
The words "accept" and "except" are frequently confused.
The words in quotation marks aren't quotes. Quotes are used to set them apart from the rest of the sentence. I truly hate pedantic posts--like this one. Sincere apologies up front, for that. I mention this
only because that use of quotations mark as a signifier has caused a huge amount of confusion in this thread. You thought I was quoting someone when I was instead setting apart a phase. In order to reduce the miscommunication, I'll use italics instead for that purpose from now on in this thread.
That out of the way, I may have misunderstood you when you listed the benefits of Lightning. I thought you were listing actual benefits when you seem to be listing
potential benefits. Is that correct? I agree, the benefits seem to be potential, not actual.
To be clear, I didn't say Lightning
requires a third party, I said it
benefits from use of a third party. The exception is mobile because you cannot open your own node on a phone, so you must use a third party to make mobile payments via Lightning. This is a major design flaw in my view.
This also creates a philosophical problem. The promise and premise of Bitcoin is that allows for trustless, peer-to-peer payments on a decentralized system that is not controlled by any government or organization. This concept is intriguing to me, and the reason why I got interested in Bitcoin in the first place. But once you start using Lightning, you've tossed at least two, if not all four of those premises. So if you are going to toss out the benefits of Bitcoin, why not just stick with Visa? Serious question.
And is it not just philosophical. To great fanfare, El Salvador declared Bitcoin as legal tender and rolled out a wallet (which you don't have to use) and its own Lightning app, called
Chivo. So instead of a decentralized payment, we have centralized system, designed and operated by the government--and a government with a very sketchy history at that. A centralized, government designed and operated payment system is as far from the basic promise of Bitcoin as you can get. Yet, many people, including some on this board, think having the El Salvador government controlling Bitcoin payments is a major step forward in the evolution of Bitcoin. Seems to me to be a gigantic leap backward, no?
Re: Paypal. Great example. IIRC, eBay's public interface was rolled out in 2000 (could be off on the dates a bit but something like that). At the time, I was a big user of Ebay (this is before you could buy anything on Amazon) and I remember when it happened. A problem at the time was most people didn't take credit cards and so you had to physically mail a check. Slow, required trust, and just a big pain. There were some work arounds, but they were a pain too. Paypal fixed all that, and it was adopted by a huge percentage of Ebay users in what seemed like overnight. Just two years later Paypal was purchased by eBay, who had come up with their own payment system but it never took off.
The Lightning whitepaper was written in 2015. Six years later, where is the Lightning eBay? Nowhere. From a consumer aspect, Visa works fine. From the merchant side, you've claimed Lightning is a cheaper payment system and it is, but only compared to native Bitcoin. The payee still has to convert Bitcoin to dollars, which is very expensive. And there are also the capitalization costs of opening a node. Those costs alone, I suspect eliminate or nearly eliminate any cost savings over Visa. As I mentioned previously, if big venders thought they could save money with Lightning, they would have done so already.