[awemany]

> It lets one party in a channel send arbitrarily large numbers of payments ("arbitrary" subject to the total payment value being capped to the channel capacity, as well as to the Bitcoin divisibility) to another without increasing the UTXO set as you would on-chain.

No that is not true. Each Lightning Channel needs UTXOs to be created before it can be used at all.

Its goal is rather to do trustless multi-hop off-chain payments on pre-opened channels.

Notice that Satoshi himself implemented simple payment channels in Bitcoin. (Without the multi-hop part)

It is all but clear that the much more complex LN contraption will help in the real world.

Furthermore, a case can be made that this going closer to decoupling Bitcoin from the economy on top. The "gold standard" argument hinted at above might be a too close historical parallel, really.

Because, eventually, the gold standard got abolished.

[zodiac]

I mean without creating a new UTXO for each micropayment. Of course you need new UTXOs to open the channel