[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).