Not exactly banks, but there's a huge chance they will be big corps with a money transmitter license, KYC, AML. What if they refuse your channel or transaction?
I think we are talking about different things. This thread is about services that will watch the blockchain for "cheaters" and will punish them on your behalf so you don't need to be always online.
You are talking about LN nodes, which work a bit differently than you seem to think it does.
For starters, anyone can "refuse" to open a channel with you, but they can't "refuse" to pass along a transaction (well they can, but because of the routing system used, you don't know where a transaction came from, or where it's going to, so they have no reason to refuse it). So if coinbase refuses to open a channel with me, I can still send money using coinbase as a middle "hop", and they would never know.
And KYC/AML laws aren't really applicable at this level in the stack. KYC laws apply regardless of what i'm buying/selling (in most cases). If I'm buying from best buy, they need to know who I am. That has nothing to do with how I'm paying, and the "middle hops" are like routers more than banks. Even if an internet router is sending a financial transaction, that doesn't mean they need to follow KYC laws. It's the same with LN, if your node is acting as a "hop" for a transaction, you don't know who or where the tx is coming from, or who or where it's going to, and it's counterparty risk free. It's more like an internet router than any kind of financial institution, so KYC laws don't apply.
It's a common misconception that block size is somehow related to decentralization. In fact you don't need a whole blockchain to verify transactions securely, you only need a few last blocks at max. Also full nodes add nothing to the network, they have no vote, only miners and actual users do.
0-confirmation transactions were working excellent before Bitcoin Core added SegWit and other useless stuff. You don't need to wait for a new block if your signed transaction is in the mempool, and it's secure enough for small payments.
0 conf transactions are incredibly insecure. If you accept one you are putting a great deal of trust in the person paying you. Bitcoin transactions are suppose to be trustless.
They are. Some context might help: when it originally launched, Bitcoin Cash was slower and more unusable than Bitcoin if you needed even a single confirmation, because the forker fucked up the difficulty adjustment algorithm so badly that blocks were every hour or so most of the time. So the Bitcoin Cash community pushed the idea that zero-confirmation transactions were safe there, unlike on the evil SegwitCoin chain, so they could claim it was still faster than Bitcoin since this was the whole selling point. There was no actual foundation for this claim, but it became vital to marketing the coin.
No, they are secure, you just have to trust miners a bit more so they don't throw your transaction out of mempool. I would even argue that all the complications involved in setting up and using Lightning network make it less secure than 0-conf.
> You don't need to wait for a new block if your signed transaction is in the mempool
Still, many companies have always required a few confirmation blocks before accepting a transaction, regardless of the amount. Like currency exchange companies, for instance.
Lightning will become centralized into services like banks and Paypal since it's too difficult to use for an average person, which completely defeats the idea of Bitcoin as P2P cryptocurrency.
1. Banks/exchanges/Paypal have KYC regulations - fulfilling these are impossible due to Onion routing provided by the nodes.
2. My mom does not know how HTTP works and she uses the Internet just fine. It's naive to think that users are going to be explicitly opening and closing channels, finding best path, etc. These can be built into wallets and abstracted out. Besides, Bitcoin of today is already too complicated for the "average" person.
The problem is Bitcoin Core, at least some part of it’s developers, pushing their own agenda to implement SegWit and Lightning network. Both solutions have a lot of technical debt and possible security problems, they were controversial from the beginning, that’s why miners were refusing to implement SegWit for over a year. Now we have Bitcoin Cash which has solved those problems in a simple way, at least for now. Bitcoin Cash is more like a desperate effort to fix the damage done by Bitcoin Core and make Bitcoin usable again.
Stop spreading false information. Segwit is implemented, it’s working. 90% of the miners are working on the Bitcoin chain which has Segwit. One large miner did not support it because the Segwit change also removed a bug in Bitcoin that enabled them to “cheat” with the mining using something they patented called ASICBOOST. They could use it but nobody else could. So they had a perverse incentive to block and delay Segwit and Now to promote BCH.
The BTC chain is SCREAMING for more transaction capacity and the Blockstream team is popping champaign (sic) that they've introduced a fee system 100 years ahead of schedule.
Bitcoin Cash is simply the manifestation of the original vision surviving a hostile takeover attempt.
How anybody can defend a crypto scaling plan introduced by a Bilderberg Group/AXA funded team is beyond me.
I've had pretty much the same experience. Bought Coin via pre-order over a year ago, couple month ago found out that it's very unlikely to be supported in my country ever. Asked them for refund - got some template response, asked again - silence.
