| Thanks for the other clarifications but this part leaves me confused. > mostly fund channels with larger nodes because that brings better connectivity (you don't want to have a channel with starbucks, mcdonalds and burger king, you want single channel with a node that invested in having a lots of channels). Lets take an example. Bob wants to pay Starbucks for his coffee. Alice is running a node which has a channel open to Starbucks.
Now he can open a channel to Starbucks directly and pay for his coffee. But that is time/fees consuming so he will pay Alice, who will then pay to Starbucks on his behalf? If that is true, doesn't that put too much power in Alice's hand? And if there are some nodes which have heavily invested in cpu/io and coins to their channels, wont they effectively control a large part of the transaction volume and hence make the network more decentralized? > you will rarely be opening and closing channels, just like you're rarely opening and closing a new debit card. I get confused every time this analogy is brought up. Sure, I don't need to open/close debit cards but those cards are loaded automatically when I get my salary/income. And the money is not tied, I can move it around as much as I want. On the other hand, again, as per my understanding LN requires me to commit an amount and I have to make do with it until the amount runs out. So, its more like a prepaid gift card with fixed commitments and a reload feature. |
what do you mean by "power"? yes, there will be nodes handling more transactions than other nodes, but that in no way prevents you from using other nodes or even investing into opening channels yourself and competing.
> those cards are loaded automatically when I get my salary/income. And the money is not tied, I can move it around as much as I want.
not everybody carries a debit card connected to their main bank account. and those that do usually have daily limits on how much they can spend, so you can't really move it around as much as you want. similar to that, not every BTC holder stores their BTC in hot wallet. funding your debit card is similar to funding your hot wallet which is similar to funding your LN channels.
don't take the analogy too far though. point is that LN allows you to do is micropayments without flooding the blockchain. there are tradeoffs involved. that's it.