[snypher]

Is this like saying "I'm riding a public transit bus, it's already driving this way, so I'm not adding to usage or load"?

Lightning network relies on layer 1 nodes, right? So unless it reduces the load on the old dirty Bitcoin network, it's just lipstick.

[lowkey]

Yes it is similar to the comparison between a single driver vehicle vs 50 people in a bus except Lightning can scale massively - to Visa/MasterCard country-level scale vs 6-7 tx/sec on Bitcoin layer 1.

If you can process 1 million times as many transactions per mined block that make it an innovative scaling solution - not sure I understand the lipstick analogy. Care to elaborate?