On the other hand, for many grandmas with smart phones all the channel management etc will be handled by the players building this stuff. There is some pretty deep money to be made taking a seat at the table where Strike is currently one of the only ones sitting.
Where the real innovation lies for this? Making all these things into a standards. Everyday folks are not going to take the time to learn what lightning is. They just need a way to pay for their stuff. And the tech will do all of this on the back end.
This is where some folks are frightened by the centralization that this will incur. And I understand that. But it is unavoidable. There is no way to build these systems in a way that people will not take the "easy route". Like a gmail account... The banks and merchants who do this well are going to have a really big seat at the table.
This is why I talked about merchants owning and operating their own nodes because it makes sence to be that they would benefit directly off of the node instead of using another and they can set their own fees without having a external person changing those fees frequently because they would have to reflect that in their store prices. Lightening is hard to understand for most and I think this is a problem for Bitcoin as well because its hard to understand people are scared of it. As soon as we can figure a way to make Bitcoin less complicated I think adoption could increase. I think vendors operating their own nodes for customers would help in making it less complicated because then the consumer does not have to worry about fees because they could be included into the price if a vendor has set them.
If there are enough vendors operating their own nodes then we do not have to worry about centralization except maybe that all retail merchants will own all of the nodes but I do not think that is to big of a problem and would not stop adoption because credit cards are currently run by one entity instead of lightening nodes being owned by the business you choose to do business with.
Do we know it's real? It looks a bit photoshoppy to me.
It is photoshopped the giveaway is the lights. The material used for bill boards does not reflect light like that. I have seen Bitcoin billboards but I am not sure they are any good at getting people to look into Bitcoin and research it.