the problem people are complaining about = low-value and consumer payments. in that case, do you really need your bitcoins back? cold storage for long term holding, lightning for short term spending. what's the problem?
and your coins aren't "on loan" when they are locked in a payment channel. they are time-locked. similarly, you can time-lock your BTC right now, making them unspendable on the network until a specific block number has passed.
i'm not convinced the topography is hub-and-spoke. but even if it is, that's more of privacy issue (all transactions processed by centralized entities) than a trust issue. it's still trustless.
How long that coffee shop that you go to gonna wait for thei actual btc and not iou’s?
How long your employee gonna wait for their paycheck of actual btc and not the iou’s?
How long are you gonna let the person from Craigslist take your item your selling with his iou?
they aren't IOUs if they are fungible with bitcoins. anyone who is willing to pay the on-chain transaction cost to close a channel can remove BTC from the time-lock. if anything, it's easier to spend bitcoins you receive in LN. why wouldn't anyone accept them? if they are interested in paying lower fees, they'll use LN.
For peer-2hub-2 peer probably work pretty good. If that hub gets shut down by a government, there goes your btc you had in the channel.
that's not true. if they get shut down by the government and can't voluntarily close channels, channels have their own timelocks and all BTC is eventually spendable.
If that hub charges high fees? There’s goes low fees.
anyone can run an LN node. there is a fee incentive to do so. why would one entity be able to charge high fees when there is competition?
You are right about the hub/Gov. You can close channel and goes back to the blockchain to record latest iou records.
That’s still centralized though. No longer peer-2-peer.
And biggest question. The person receiving btc in the channel. Say 1 way channel, how long average sandwich shop owned by mom and pop gonna extend you credit? (Meaning you took meat and bread from them, they were paid in an iou they can do absolutely nothing with until channel closed.
If it were my biz. I’d raise my fees for btc by $20 a sandwich, open channel, customer would think channel open forever (or until btc balance gone) but soon as they leave. I’m closing the channel. So as the sandwich shop, cost me $10 close channel. For customer, they need wait 3 hours for channel open, pay $10 for the blockchain “open channel” then when I close it, they need to repeat.
