Nice stuff! 24-hour outages are unfavorable for payment systems. Even in the traditional banking system, we have had a few hours of downtime X times, for online banking. If more banks are deciding to go full digital, there will be more downtimes scheduled I assume. As for Lightning; it is genius, it bypasses any update time, I assume you just won't be able to close/open a pay stream during the downtime of BTC (which is already really low).
I'm pretty sure that's how it would work, yeah. Also, there are at least two major lightning implementations that I know of (CLI and LND), so that helps to even out any bigger failures within lightning itself when it's not the same software with everyone.
Was listening to theycallmedan the other day, and he was mentioning lightning and shared his thoughts about it. His thoughts are something to take into consideration, that eventually Lightning as a layer2 may end up being a less, but still centralized payment gateway.
For now, it's definitely forcing change in the traditional money system. We just need to be careful not to be making the same mistakes and errors. One of the biggest signs of that, to me, is that we're still calculating BTC and other cryptocurrencies back to FIAT. Then again, it takes some balls and some serious reserved money to be able to sell a corporate photoshoot for 2500 Satoshi (2500EUR) in my case for example. With Lightning, this seems to be much more doable in the near future as it eliminates most of the gas fees.
Yeah, I listened to that too. He isn't very precise with the critique though. Centralization of what? Lightning is a completely open and permissionless, like bitcoin. Unlike with traditional banking system, you need no license from the government for sending, receiving or routing payments (on the protocol level). Only capital and know-how.
If his critique is about centralization of liquidity, well that simply isn't a problem, because having lots of liquidity gives no power over the protocol. And if an entity with lots of liquidity tries to abuse their position by putting a premium on fees, well, more routers/payment processors will pop up with lower fees and capture that value. Permissionless protocol allows for maximum competition which means you actually have to compete with your service to have a good business.
If liquidity centralizes on lightning, that just means that that entity is very good at managing that liquidity and provides it where it's needed. I struggle to find the problem with this.
That's simply because BTC is still tiny in marketcap. Once BTC starts to hold a bigger share of individual wealth there's more will to use it for payments. That's when people will start to calibrate measuring value in satoshis. It just takes time.