We all know about the limitations of Ethereum and Bitcoin and given the expected rise in adoption these problems will only increase.
To solve that is no simple task and can only be done through optimization of almost all aspects that make a cryptocurrency.
The progress mentioned was a great leap towards reaching that final goal.
And yet, Lightning Network developers claim it would enable up to millions of transactions per second, no? Won't that render HEAT's "purist" on-chain scaling rather moot? What's the use case for relatively "slow" on-chain scaling in such a future?
Lightning introduces some large parties to which we send all our funds. (introducing reliability on those parties)
Now we do all our transactions on the sub network between these large parties.
When needed the large parties will settle transfers between them on the bitcoin blockchain.
This leaves out the smaller parties to take part in the lightning network.
The success of Bitcoin has been the decentralization, adding centralization to it well thats basically what it is. Centralization.
No doubt one day HEAT will stop working on your average home PC and as with Bitcoin will require at least a decent internet size server with fast networking.
But with that in place I believe we are set and can have an on chain solution that does 10,000 or more txns a second and its still possible (encouraged even) for many hundreds or maybe thousands of nodes to take part in it. Sure it would cost you a few hundred a month on a decent server but POP (rewards for hosting of previous block archived) will reward you, how much that depends on the price of HEAT.
With that in place I do see a use case for HEAT which does the fast transactions and the massive storage divided over possibly many terrabytes of blockchain choped in pieces.
That last part is not what lightning offers.
And speaking of lightning, that actually needs a way to offload these lightning transactions. The HEAT blockchain could one day be great for such.
Edit:
As an addition to that, in order to operate your microservices you need to either run them on your own node or have them hosted on a node that is plugged into the transaction stream. If you'd ask me HEAT's real impact will be the way microservices allow anyone to operate cheap, fast and bank grade secure financial services all by themselves.
So as for the question what is the point of HEAT when there is Lightning network?
Well lightning doesnt provide the data stream for our microservices now does it!