This great tweet by Mortuus Bestia, got me to thinking about the value of the lightning network vs. simply using another coin.
If you need to pay to open a “payment channel”, it would be just as easy to sell that amount for BCH, effectively opening a “payment channel” where you actually control your money, instead of having it a convoluted “2nd Layer”.
I am still learning about the lightning network, but from what I know now, if it is as easy (or easier) and cheap to exchange for BCH as it is to open a payment channel, and BCH is as widely accepted as BTC (via Lightning), then the only possible advantage to using Lightning would be maintaining exposure to the value of BTC, with the money that you are using for payments.
It seems that there will always be insecurity in the lightning network, so it will never be smart to keep large sums in a payment channel. If that is the case than you would never want to keep a significant amount of money in a payment channel and the lost exposure to a rising BTC price would be insignificant (this is assuming you beleive BTC will outpace BCH, which I don’t).
If merchant adoption of BCH (or another cryptocurrency that functions for payments) is even close to comparable to lightning network adoption (which it should be) it wouldn’t make sense to hold your BTC in a payment channel at all, and most people would choose to use a payment coin instead.
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