Topic: Is Lightning Network inherently flawed due to required 24/7 online - page 2. (Read 329 times)

So I didn't realize until just now that you can't receive payments unless you are online. I knew you had to be online, but I was thinking about being online to route stuff or the worry about your payment channel connection closing the channel when you're not online. I never thought about the fact that you can't receive payments if you're not online.

Now obviously for merchants this doesn't matter because its no different that how things work currently, if the merchant is down they aren't gonna be receiving payments because their services aren't usable at that time anyways.

But for your standard bitcoin user, this situation seems completely untenable and would seem to make the LN unusable.
The average bitcoin user will be using their computer or phone as their LN client. There are plenty of times when those devices are offline. It should work like Venmo, for example, doesn't matter if you are online or offline, you should always be able to receive payments. So it would seem that the only way LN will work in reality for 99.999% of people who aren't both enthusiasts and techies who know how to set up their own always online server, will be to use it through centralized trusted third parties that provide client applications that you fund from your bitcoin account, but you trust them to control your bitcoin in the payment channel, which obviously is opposite the bitcoin model.

Is it possible that there is just no way to scale blockchain without either introducing centralization or relying on trusted third parties? On-chain scaling like BCH will result in high centralization and therefore low security which is disastrous, LN will rely on centralization and trusted third parties perhaps not in theory but certainly in reality.

It would seem at best LN would work as a single direction payment channel, where regular users pay always-online merchants. For that case it works perfectly fine. But this means Bitcoin still needs a scalability solution that allows regular users who aren't always online to send money between one another, without the centralization and security nightmares that the on-chain-only scaling solutions create.