[chatmasta]

Who says the merchant needs to do that work? Specialized companies run like exchanges (or payment networks) could run the nodes on behalf of the merchants, much like bitpay does today. Of course, then you're just back where you started, with a banking institution controlling payments. But perhaps it would be more decentralized than four big payment companies, and that could be a step in the right direction.

[runeks]

It’s not about work. Borrowing money isn’t time-consuming. It’s about the cost of capital, and the inefficiency of requiring a scarce resource to be locked up with no other purpose than lowering the risk of losing a week’s revenue from 0.1% to zero.

[iso-8859-1]

Why do you think the merchant needs to lock up funds? If his exchange supports Lightning, the merchant would never need to worry about the fact that transactions won't hit the blockchain (if nobody is cheating or losing connectivity).