Your first link has refuting or critical comments from such notables as Vitalik Buterin and Brahm Cohen. In case anyone wanted a tl;dr to actually reading and evaluating that 15 minute logical fallacy of a read. And the other ones just reference the first link.
Not really true. You can offload monitoring blockchain to "watchers" (privately), and if you have a pay-only wallet you don't have to watch for anything anyway.
On top of that LN is very practical for heaviest blockchain users, that do run full node 24/7 anyway.
That sounds like a semantic distinction; a computer working for you has to watch the network 24/7. Besides, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Hiring a watcher sounds tricky if you want it to be really trustless, it sounds cumbersome, and frankly I can’t find any good info on how it works.
AFAIK it can be done anonymously, for a tiny price and a bit bigger bounty (if found). Since the state of the channel is private, watcher has no information about anything anyway. On top of it - it's only a secondary defense. Your wallet still can do the monitoring by themselves and other party can't know that you dissapeared from the internet and won't appear in next 24 hours in advance. Other party risks reputation and their own funds if they get caught by you or your watcher(s). Because of that attacks like that are very infeasible.
Like any crypto currency, the numbers in computers are worth whatever people believe they’re worth. So when enough people believe said numbers are worth zero, then the currency will be worth 0. Some may say the same is true for fiat, however the difference with fiat is most national currencies are backed by the might of military force to convince or coerce people into believing the value is > 0.
http://www.coppolacomment.com/2018/01/probability-for-geeks....
http://www.coppolacomment.com/2018/01/lightning-and-fat-cont...