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But having to manually submit the newer signature to steal the other guys funds back for cheating is not very mass adoption friendly. Other scaling methods will help a lot though at least LN isn't the only thing on the table.
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No, it is not user friendly - but having a screw driver for nails in a wall is also not user friendly. And as Lightning network is a "MICRO PAYMENT CHANNEL", then micro amounts can get lost - based on everyones personal risk appetite... At the point in time, where a lightning channel is opened, both parties sign a smart contract, with pre-defined conditions! So the details are known - it doesn't/shouldn't come as a surprise. So you know what you do...
I think the point is, that Lightning is a micro payment channel. Too new to be fully understood by everyone (and that's probably due to the fact that so many misinterpretations/FUD are around), with a steep learning curve. Hence need to manage expectations. With more and more nodes getting in production (and usecases on top), I am convinced we'll see more and more userfriendly software. I wouldn't want give my money into a smart contract, which is written by noobs in Java Script like language, with many proofs of losses, in the million dollars range. Turing complete and easy to write contracts, but "good" for user friendliness?
- no thanks!
That Lightning baby is barely 3 month on main net now, and expectations are already high? Please, give it a bit more time!
It's a bi-directional payment channel. So e.g. for streaming music, and paying per title, per minute, or even per parts of a minute. In the strong sense, this could be done with a uni directional payment channel. Lightning adds on top the possibility to create a network, where you can rely on others, and if their node goes down, find a new route and continue payments. This makes it fault tolerant.
I want to stress again the micro payments in both directions. Not huge amounts of money, just micro payments. And like in real life, you don't send pennies back and forth. Au contraire, if you go to your grocery shop with a kilo of pennies, they might refuse the payment.
Lightning is certainly not a replacement for your bitcoin wallet - it is an extension. It was repeatedly mentioned, that mostly companies/merchants would run 24/7 LN nodes, and also there is discussion around 3rd parties, which do some kind of watching service, in case one party is offline - (Windows) computers tend to reboot or break sometimes :-(
If it is preferred to have non-mirco payment channels, that become more user friendly, then one could think about uni-directional payment channels. They are already for some years around, and the time-lock based payment channels had to wait for SegWit to lock in (melleability fix), or they had to use CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY (CLTV, I think in 2016) or last recently CHECKSEQUENCEVERIFY (CSV). These payment channels allow to create connectivity between a service provider and a host, like publishers or even video (
https://streamium.io).
If lightning channels are not needed, or there are no regular payments required, or the personal, specific usecase is unknown, at any time "we" are free to send normal bitcoin transaction. Preferably a segwit tx ...