| > If the merchant wants to receive funds via the gateway then funds need to be locked in a payment channel between the gateway and the merchant. If I keep the scenario where the merchant doesn't want to lock anything in the LN, then the gateway can do it, and charge a fee for transacting through it. It's the gateway's choice to open such a channel or not. The "expensive" part is compensated by the fee which is chosen by the gateway operator. If the merchant chooses to "lock" a bit to participate in LN, it's easier to rebalance his channels once 1000 people depleted the channel, eliminating the "inflexible". Besides, after all the fees saved by not using the Bitcoin blockchain for 1000 transactions, one can open a new channel to deal with that as well. And again, nothing is ever "locked" in the LN, at any moment anyone (e.g. the merchant) can send everything back to on-chain or even to exchanges that use LN. There is no reason to believe that on-chain is less "locked". As such, it's not expensive nor inflexible, or in any case, less than Bitcoin itself. Of course it would be easier if there was nothing to think about, but centralized solutions all have their set of problems as well, and that's another debate. In the mean time, LN works well at its scale and push back like yours feels like a "perfect is the enemy of good" kind of situation. |