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Bitcoin's Highly Anticipated 'Lightning Network' Goes Live (thehill.com)
Lightning Labs on Thursday announced the beta release of its highly-anticipated Lightning Network Daemon (LND), a developer-friendly software client used to access Bitcoin's Lightning Network, anonymous readers wrote, citing media reports. From a report: Bitcoin supporters believe that the network has the potential to help the cryptocurrency achieve mass adoption. Bitcoin has struggled in recent months with slow and high-fee transactions, which make it harder for bitcoin to achieve mainstream popularity. Lightning Labs, the company behind the network, also announced on Thursday that it has received investments from major financial technology players, including Square chief executive and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and PayPal chief operating officer David Sacks.
So, in other words, the solution to the problems of a decentralized currency is to centralize control into one broker or another thus negating the actual benefits of the block chain and going back to brokering in trust.
The reason bitcoin was hailed as a currency solution is that it removed trust from any human controlled entity and moved it into a equation which was calculated by many different people such that it would be obvious if someone was trying to tamper with the results. Now places like Coinbase and the lightening network are expecting people to trust them instead of the equations, thus negating any of the actual benefits of bitcoin itself. How can you be certain that Coinbase is consolidating the transactions properly? Can you see how they do this mathematically? If it is not all in the open how can you be sure this wont lead to gaming the market?
Until they find a way to put every single transaction on the ledger at a low cost and high speed, crypto-curriencies will never become a mainstream thing.