Even more: Adam once claimed that the LN would achieve 10'000 transactions for every blockchain transaction. Leaving aside what that would mean for the coin lock-in periods of the channels, the rate of 1:10'000 is so close to 0:10'000 that no one would notice if the LN just dropped bitcoin altogether, and from then on just shuffled its "cryptochecks" around indefinitely, without ever settling them.
Conversely 1:10000 is so close to 0:10000 that you might as well just leave it on the Bitcoin blockchain. The benefit of not doing so would be negligible.
The LN would want to disable bitcoin settlements for the same general reasons that the US government decided to end the convertibility of the US dollar to gold or silver.
Namely, tying LN payments to bitcoin imposes many limitations on hubs and clients. For example, a big deterrent to LN adoption is the requirement that a new user locks in advance into each new channel an amount of bitcoins sufficient to cover his payments for the next 100 (or next 10'000, according to Adam) payments that she expects to make through that channel. VISA, on the other hand, gives a bunch of credit to the new client, so she does not have to deposit anything upfront. The hubs cannot do the same because they would have to lock real bitcoins, not simply let her pay on credit. if the LN could decouple from bitcoin, it could let hubs create money by credit, like banks do...
Also, one big problem that the LN is still trying to solve is what happens if the bitcoin network suffers a spam attack that delays a fraction of the legit traffic for days. That could cause many channel settlement transactions to be delayed past the channel timeouts, effectively doing a permanent chargeback on every payment that was made through those channels. And/or it would force the receiving parties of those payments to issue extra transactions in an attempt to push their settlement transactions through with CPFP: and those attempts would eat into their profits, would make the backlog worse, and would be guaranteed to fail in a large fraction of the cases, whatever the fees they used. Again, decoupling the LN from the bictoin system would eliminate that and may other problems...
BTW, I'm pretty sure the LN people have stated that block size increases of some sort would be needed. I don't know where Blockstream stands on this. Maybe they want people to anchor their channels on their Improved Bitcoin Sidealtchain instead of Bitcoin.
My reading of history is that Greg Maxwell got pathologically obsessed with the fee market idea years ago, and won't give up on it, no matter what others say. Some Blockstream employees, especially the guy who is working on LN, even said publicly that the LN would require increasing the limit; but Greg does not seem to be impressed. That may be the reason why Blockstream has committed to the disgusting SegWit hack, that will provide some relief (especially to the LN, that may require humongous signatures) without touching the sacred 1 MB limit.
(There is an exchange in this forum, some years ago, where Greg says that the 1 MB limit is as sacred as the 21 M BTC limit, and he would not have put any time into bitcoin if Satoshi's design did not include it. Gavin then points out that the 1 MB was not in the original design, and quotes Satoshi's Oct/2010 post where he explains that the limit could be lifted when needed by a simple 2-line patch and a routine hard-fork release. I did not see Greg's answer. Considering that he has never answered Mike's "crash landing" post either, I assume that he just shut that fact too out of his mind, since it did not fit his convictions...)
Jorge, you seem to get so caught up in analyzing personalities and trivial stupid details that sometimes it becomes very difficult to recognize any value that you might be attempting to communicate in these bitcoin discussions.. that you supposedly have no investment...
I have difficulties understanding how someone who is trying to come off as an academic can get so side tracked with attempts at irrelevant digs into attempts to find bad motives and assertions that individuals are simple and driven by narrow agendas. It's like you attempt to find the side that is most positive for bitcoin, and then you take the opposite stance to attempt to portray ideas to undermine any bitcoin value...
