[mundo]

> My understanding is...

That's how two finserv companies would transact off-chain with each other, but when I go to buy a cup of coffee with a bitcoin, I'm not opening up a payment channel with them for one transaction, that would defeat the whole point. The coffee shop will use a payment processor, who isn't going to deal with me off-chain unless I'm the KYC'd customer of them or some other finserv they trust. (please correct me if I'm wrong here)

[moduspol]

I think you're correct in that this will be the inevitable result. It just won't really be for trust reasons.

You won't want to open up a payment channel to them, but you don't need to. You just need an already open payment channel to someone who is, or (more importantly) there is some route of payment channels between you and them through any number of intermediaries.

There won't be a way to enforce KYC on the network itself, and you don't need trust for this to work.

But because of the inherent cost / time / complexity reduction benefits of just maintaining big channels between large entities, normal people and businesses will inevitably be incentivized to just work through banks to do this. The banks can just hold all their money and handle keeping the channels between themselves open and funded.

And that's where I think you're correct. It leads to a world where KYC can be required easily because the vast majority of legitimate use cases will be through centralized endpoints.

[xur17]

In the case of purchasing coffee, your payment can make multiple hops (through multiple channels) to the coffee shop. This means you only need a channel open with 1 participant in order to be able to transact, and none of you need to trust each other.