[masterjack]

And if you go offline for a few hours, your peers can steal your balance (unless you entrust somebody else to monitor it for you, which has its own tradeoffs)

[kyledrake]

So basically, it turns into a ridiculously complicated bank. That requires 42tWh of power waste (and growing) to function.

I'm sorry, but I'm not impressed. Let's build a solution that scales better on-chain and uses a more power efficient mining algorithm.

[wtfstatists]

> uses a more power efficient mining algorithm

Thats axiomatically impossible. Its the amount of energy required, not nhashes/etc, that disincentivize an attacker from rewriting history.

[DennisP]

Well, it's the financial cost required, which in PoW is a combination of energy and capital cost.

[imtringued]

I think a combination of both is required for optimal results. Lightning is good enough for micropayments. On chain transactions are good for large payments. The only problem with on-chain scaling is that keeping a payment history for the entire planet is not really feasable. You have to somehow prune old data from the blockchain.

[EthanHeilman]

What are the trade offs to having say 100,000 other parties monitor your channel for you?