[marcinjachymiak]

You don't have to be on exactly 24/7. The default delay for spending coins from a commitment txn is 144 blocks in some clients and is usually scaled with channel size. Most clients let you configure it manually too.

That means you'd have to be online once within 24 hours of your counterparty trying to steal your channel balance to stop them. IMO this is pretty reasonable for a cellphone user.

It doesn't follow that this would lead to centralization of custody either. If you want to pay for better liveness you could pay someone to run a watchtower to watch your channels. Basically, it watches the blockchain for bad channel closes and posts the justice txn with the correct settlement for you in case it sees it. I'd be surprised if a service like LN_Strike didn't start using these.

https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd/blob/master/docs/wat...

[zapdrive]

According to Bitcoin maximalists 2mb blocks are too much for our infrastructure, and will hinder everyone from running their own node. But apparently keeping a node online 24 hours is not a big deal.

[MarkSweep]

So all anyone one needs to do to steal your money is DDoS you?