[UncleEntity]

> Lightning has huge capital costs. You need to lock up large amounts of bitcoin in these channels for significant amounts of time.

Isn't that kind of the point?

You conduct your day to day transactions outside the bitcoin network and (presumably) only need to hit the blockchain on rare occasions. Or so I assume not having read the whitepaper.

Having studied the history of money and banking in a previous lifetime I'd say it's more akin to gold backed deposit certificates with guarantees against double-spending and fractional reserves.

[grubles]

"You need to lock up large amounts of bitcoin in these channels for significant amounts of time."

That's actually false. The protocol actually limits channels to a fraction of a bitcoin currently (something like 0.1 or maybe even 0.01 BTC).

[UncleEntity]

I think they mean across all channels implying some "velocity of money" fallacy harming the bitcoin network.