[Olreich]

Lightning network pulls transactions off-chain, thus relying on trusting someone (either the person you transact with or some third party acting as escrow for the funds). By adding in trust, you can mitigate the primary bottleneck caused by proof-of-work consensus methods. But if you have people you can trust to transact with, there's no point in interfacing with Bitcoin at all, just make a micro-payment network without the bitcoin connectivity, like Venmo. This is why we don't see adoption of Lightning Network, it just moves us off of Bitcoin, which lets us get most of the "benefits" for none of the costs.

[mirceal]

That's not how lightning works. While it's true that the transactions are off-chain there is no trust element involved.

A channel between 2 entities is backed by real bitcoin and a scheme to manage the ledger based on bitcoin primitives (multisignature).

Lightning is just a series of channels + routing, so in effect it's a path of channels between you and the party you are transacting with + ledgers of those channels updating with the value that is being moved. At any point in time you can close any channel and materialize however bitcoin you have on your side.