[trompetenaccoun]

Lightening was first developed by Joseph Poon, a teenager who went on to work on Ethereum. He improved on his original idea with Plasma which was supposed to be deployed on Ethereum but was eventually abandoned for better more sophisticated scaling solutions.

The idea of lightening is literally just taking transactions off chain to reduce cost. That is it. So the solution to scaling the blockchain is not using the blockchain. I think this was invented already, it's called a (centralized) database.

The most amusing aspect of it is that Bitcoin supporters are trying to sell this as a big technological innovation when it's literally just circumventing the bloated chain.

[randomhodler84]

Centralized database indeed! If you really feel LN is centralized, I point at infura et al and say that EVM chains by design can exist for 99.999% of their users as centralized databases accessed over http apis.

LN is a abstracted layered approach, the only realistic scaling design that works on the internet. It was disappointing that plasma style constructions were not successful. I really believe this is where we should go, but alas there is money to be made from issuing tokens for users of your sidechain, (even ones that use ETH as gas!). Actual innovative constructions may not allow you to increase the number of tradable units, so they get less attention.

I don’t even buy the tale that the roll up chains are another layer, it’s just moving the tx off chain to another chain, which operate mostly like centralized databases.

I argue that it is not more sophisticated, rather, it is much of the same with some magical zk binding to hide the seams.